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

The Sasquatch

I met him in winter, out behind the old high school
where clouds, gray with frost, found us both.
We were lost.

Asleep by an old shelter
he saw me too late to lumber off with his wide gait
that you’ve seen on conspiracy theory programs.

He was real, with a musk as thick as his fur,
and hands large enough to palm my face
like a basketball.

As the snow came down – first tiny stars
and then large, white blobs that clung to my face
– I found my body huddled close to his,
those arms a soft tent.

Through the night I listened to his heavy breaths
that could have brought an avalanche upon villagers
were we closer to the mountains.

I’d like to see him again,
to dispute the evidence that I was too cold,
too sick to identify the conspicuous creature
with whom I spent a night in the woods.
I’d like to see him again, to say, Hello,
are you lonely?, to tell him,
So am I.

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.