This Is How Our Eyes Are Invisible How Our Eyes Are the Record
- after the X-Files
Tonight is ergot the taste of gentle fear when I hang up the phone
another bright sign blinking behind me like a sprinkling of sugar
on my tongue and I bite my cheek like the snake eats his own tail
like I block another list of callers. I scream and paint the story up
my arms and down my back. You cross the street, Agent
Scully. You cross and I see your desire for filth for a self
unrecognizable how the needle threads denial into skin how
the needle plays the record again scratches how the needle
touches down in red comes back redder. Ergot. It tells you,
Dana, that crossroads bear consequences. We know what a lie is—
how it claws at our hair at the truth out here on our skin
we know enough to write it down on paper before he can steal it
away. And this is the truth on my skin: a black scar I see only
in the mirror, an ergot easily found in sleepless nights, the wrong
medication at eighteen. Doctor Scully, I’d love to know how
that ouroboros ate into you how it disappeared the evidence your
creamy white skin your unmarked spine. Regret is a church
for those of us with memory, for those of us whose stories run in
a straight line, never erased or overwritten as we touch the snake
burrowing deep how we touch the body it burns through
our own selves not because we have to but because we can.
E. Kristin Anderson is a poet, Starbucks connoisseur, and glitter enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and Hysteria: Writing the female body (Sable Books, forthcoming). Kristin is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including A Guide for the Practical Abductee (Red Bird Chapbooks), Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press), and Behind, All You’ve Got (Semiperfect Press, forthcoming). Kristin is an assistant poetry editor at The Boiler and an editorial assistant at Sugared Water. Once upon a time she worked nights at The New Yorker. Find her online at EKristinAnderson.com and on twitter at @ek_anderson.