Kristin Gustafson is a poet, editor, and sentient ball of anxiety from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Her poems have been published in Troublemaker Firestarter, Anti-Heroin Chic, Moss Puppy Mag, Coffee People Zine, Contemporary Verse 2, and various other magazines. You can find her on Twitter @kristinthered and on Instagram @kristingustafsone

Kinda Funny Poetry Bio

Kristin Gustafson is a poet and editor from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Contemporary Verse 2, Troublemaker Firestarter, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @kristinthered and on Instagram @kristingustafsone

Traditional/Stuffy Poetry Bio

And They Don't Stop Coming: A Decaying Shrekstina

Page 46-47 The B’K Volume 15, Issue 1 (Winter 2024) issue. 

Ace Poetica

on learning to love your scars

Published in The Quarter(ly): Vol. VIII - Laughter and Tears


cymbalta diary

Published in The Quarter(ly): Vol. VIII - Laughter and Tears

when the ghost-hunting eboy you’re simping for says his favorite poet is rupi kaur 

This poem won Second place in the 2-Day Poem Contest 2023. 

when I told my father I wanted to die: a contrapuntal

The first poem in the "Sad Poems 4 Horny People" issue.

Ode to the Almost-First Time

Of Guinea Pigs and Men

The first time I heard my best friend play viola, I cried.

How strange it is to know someone in one context, but not another,
how a housecat knows a lark only for her flesh, and not her song. 

String Theory

My father cries after I read him a poem, but speaks over me at dinner: a contrapuntal 

He is fifty-eight and healthy 
but Death has been greedy this year. 

He tells me to play the spirituals that he believed in, the ballads he loved.
He wants to be lowered into the earth to the songs that made him feel alive. 

My father plays for me the album he wishes for me to play at his funeral. 

My father 
 
in the garden sewing fallen tomatoes back to their vines 
catches a glimpse of his father in the skin of an heirloom. 
 
Asks himself if family means the same to him now as it did then--

From the Vine

In college, 
I thought I was in love with 

the sweater-clad boy
sitting in the coffee shop

Sipping on irony 
before his fingers

found guitar strings 
Took avant-garde 

to the extreme 
Hid depression 

in the pockets 
of his maroon jeans 

Owen

It’s My Twenty-Second Birthday and My Grandmother Calls Me

to ask me how old I am. 
She jokes that I will be as old as she is in a few years. 
I laugh, but I do not want to. 

She is 85, and she repeats her stories more often than not.

It's My Twenty-Second Birthday and My Grandmother Calls Me

i find myself watching a video
of a girl painting with a knife,
spreading her indigos and violets 
like metal has never been used to kill, 
like creation is the only 
reason for a knife to exist
telling her viewers 
it’s harder than it looks. 

jenna marbles leaves the internet

You should have left him
at the first sign of smoke,  
billowing from your body like
the ghost of your last cigarette. 

At the first sign of smoke,
instead, you stayed, with
the ghost of your last cigarette,
his love, your nicotine.

smoke: a pantoum

on days like this, i crave silence, 
wish the bees rattling in my brain would leave
me in peace, buzz off to a different 
flower in need. my chest is filled 
with unanswered questions, balloons ready
to pop at any moment, sighs my lungs are ready to 

Selected work