Eric Anderson

Ten Days In November

It’s not timeless, because poets fall in and out of favor, and most poems disappear the moment after they’re written, and anyway the whole planet will be devoured by the sun in a few billion years, and when that happens, no one is going to run around screaming, The poetry! Save the poetry!

As A Boy

my two favorite toys were a stuffed rabbit, / British grey and glass eyed, and a raggedy / monkey I called “Monkum” because my tongue / and throat strangled my words.

Good Morning, Crisis

To see the feather on the filthy mat beneath the gas pedal is infinite sadness. / No more opposite a place for a feather to be, no worse way / for it to get there than how it must have come, / on the bottom of a shoe.

Poems

— from “A Warning” | Today I feel better, because I woke thinking everything that disappears from the planet / might reappear somewhere else. The thought was grand at first.

The League

The Stray

Permanent Lessons

Committed Relationships

Zombies

My Mother’s Convalescence

I was riding in the back seat of my Aunt Belle’s Cadillac when my cousin Joanie whispered, “You want some gum?” then leaned over to me and stuck her tongue in my mouth. When she sat back, smiling, I found that she’d left her gum behind. It was gnarled and cold and foreign-tasting, I suppose because it was wet with someone else’s saliva.