Spotlight: Pull Me Out of the Earth and Feed Me to My Madness (after The X-Files)
Look at our bones laid bare on the metal or in the grass.
Slides spill like memories across the wall and while he sees his
favorite legend again Scully has to hold her science in her chest.
What even is real in 1999? In 2018 when I turn off cable news
call my grandmother stuff laundry into a giant sack? This is my
ritual murder: the dishes the doctors the documentation—
a mountain. In his fantasy he is always right knower of truths
snuffing women out like smoking candle wicks. Like Scully
I am melting. I am questioning my findings. I am breathing.
We endeavor to find the most logical conclusion this approach
the only way to pass from day to night. He is a skeleton
but his bones do not hold us up. Look at the lights in the sky—
as alive as I am I began by rotting in a wild field. Scully
breathes in spores a lie falls dark into that underground place
and I have a shovel and will dig up the dirt to know what cryptic
science brought us here all these acres of eyes of silence
some social narcosis the edges of our vision always pulling in
that flicker of emergency the truth in me always acid on skin
a legend of my own that I remember to believe because lights
in the sky are not enough to pull me from a promise ribs out.
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 and Hysteria: Writing the female body (forthcoming). Kristin’s poetry has been published worldwide in many magazines and she is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry, including A Guide for the Practical Abductee, Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night, Fire in the Sky, 17 seventeen XVII, and Behind, All You’ve Got (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.
