The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: E. Kristin Anderson's "A Guide for the Practical Abductee"

Ouija Board Redux

We’d just watched
Witchboard. Some of us
pretended to be afraid,
but not me. I took hold
of that planchette and
closed my eyes.

Grandma used to say
she was a seer and so
I thought for a moment
I’d believe her. The energy
took hold and too many fingers
were touching.

The other girl, the living one,
she eyed me, laughed,
suspicious. But the dead one,
the haunting in her not-eyes,
the answers I don’t have
still stick to me.

This selection comes from E. Kristin Anderson’s A Guide for the Practical Abductee, available now from Red Bird Chapbooks. Purchase your copy here!

Kristin Anderson is a Pushcart-nominated poet and author who grew up in Westbrook, Maine and is a graduate of Connecticut College. She has a fancy diploma that says “B.A. in Classics,” which makes her sound smart but has not helped her get any jobs in Ancient Rome. Kristin is the co-editor ofDear Teen Me,an anthology based on the popular website and her YA memoir The Summer of Unraveling is forthcoming in 2017 from ELJ Publications. Her poetry has been published worldwide in many magazines and anthologies and she is the author of five chapbooks: A Jab of Deep Urgency (Finishing Line Press) and 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, 2015), Acoustic Battery Life (forthcoming from ELJ Publications) and 17 Days (forthcoming from Choose the Sword Press). Kristin an editor at NonBinary Review, helps make books at Lucky Bastard Press, and is a poetry editor at Found Poetry Review. Once upon a time she worked at The New Yorker. She now lives in Austin, TX where she works as a freelance editor and writing coach and is trying to trick someone into publishing her full-length collection of erasure poems based on women’s and teen magazines. She blogs at EKristinAnderson.com and tweets at @ek_anderson.

Hunter Parsons is a senior at Kalamazoo College pursuing a degree in English with a writing emphasis. She has been published in The Cauldron, Kalamazoo College’s literary magazine, and is being mentored by poet Diane Seuss. When she’s not writing, being a plant mom, or advocating for young women’s self esteem, Hunter is baking and organizing her ever-growing make-up collection.