Title Page
Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns
a collection of poetry
†
by Andrea Gibson
Write Bloody Publishing
America’s Independent Press
Long Beach, CA
writebloody.com
Copyright Information
Copyright © Andrea Gibson 2010
No part of this book may be used or performed without written consent from the author, if living, except for critical articles or reviews.
Gibson, Andrea.
1st digital edition.
ISBN: 978-1-935904-89-2
E-book Layout by Lea C. Deschenes
Cover Designed by Jeff Harmon
Photo by Drew Angerer
Illustrations by Anis Mojgani
Proofread by Jennifer Roach
Edited by Saadia Byram and Derrick Brown
Special thanks to Lightning Bolt Donor, Weston Renoud
Printed in Tennessee, USA
Write Bloody Publishing
Long Beach, CA
Support Independent Presses
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To contact the author, send an email to [email protected]
Epigraph
“I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would have loved ‘em all. If I’d a knowed more I’d a loved more.”
—From Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
Dedication
For Vox Feminista,
“Comforting the disturbed
and disturbing the comfortable.”
Enormous Thanks.
www.voxfeminista.org
Pole Dancer
She pole-dances to gospel hymns.
Came out to her family in the middle of Thanksgiving grace.
I knew she was trouble
two years before our first date.
But my heart was a Labrador Retriever
with its head hung out the window of a car
tongue flapping in the wind
on a highway going 95
whenever she walked by.
So I mastered the art of crochet
and I crocheted her a winter scarf
and one night at the bar I gave it to her with a note
that said something like,
I hope this keeps your neck warm.
If it doesn’t give me a call.
The key to finding love
is fucking up the pattern on purpose,
is skipping a stitch,
is leaving a tiny, tiny hole to let the cold in
and hoping she mends it with your lips.
This morning I was counting her freckles.
She has five on the left side of her face, seven on the other
and I love her for every speck of trouble she is.
She’s frickin’ awesome.
Like popcorn at a drive-in movie
that neither of us has any intention of watching.
Like Batman and Robin
in a pick-up truck in the front row with the windows steamed up.
Like Pacman in the eighties,
she swallows my ghosts.
Slaps me on my dark side and says,
“Baby, this is the best day ever.”
So I stop listening for the sound of the ocean
in the shells of bullets I hoped missed us
to see there are white flags from the tips of her toes
to her tear ducts
and I can wear her halos as handcuffs
‘cause I don’t wanna be a witness to this life,
I want to be charged and convicted,
ear lifted to her song like a bouquet of yes
because my heart is a parachute that has never opened in time
and I wanna fuck up that pattern,
leave a hole where the cold comes in and fill it every day with her sun,
‘cause anyone who has ever sat in lotus for more than a few seconds
knows it takes a hell of a lot more muscle to stay than to go.
And I want to grow
strong as the last patch of sage on a hillside
stretching towards the lightning.
God has always been an arsonist.
Heaven has always been on fire.
She is a butterfly knife bursting from a cocoon in my belly.
Love is a half moon hanging above Baghdad
promising to one day grow full,
to pull the tides through our desert wounds
and fill every clip of empty shells with the ocean.
Already there is salt on my lips.
Lover, this is not just another poem.
This is my goddamn revolt.
I am done holding my tongue like a bible.
There is too much war in every verse of our silence.
We have all dug too many trenches away from ourselves.
This time I want to melt like a snowman in Georgia,
‘til my smile is a pile of rocks you can pick up
and skip across the lake of your doubts.
Trust me,
I have been practicing my ripple.
I have been breaking into mannequin factories
and pouring my pink heart into their white paint.
I have been painting the night sky upon the inside of doorframes
so only moonshine will fall on your head in the earthquake.
I have been collecting your whispers and your whiplash
and your half–hour-long voice mail messages.
Lover, did you see the sunset tonight?
Did you see Neruda lay down on the horizon?
Do you know it was his lover who painted him red,
who made him stare down the bullet holes
in his country’s heart?
I am not looking for roses.
I want to break like a fever.
I want to break like the Berlin Wall.
I want to break like the clouds
so we can see every fearless star,
how they never speak guardrail,
how they only say fall.
Yarrow
We packed our lives into the back of your truck
and drove two thousand miles
back to the only home you’d ever known.
On the bayou you ate crawfish.
I wished I had never become a vegetarian.
Here, whatever you came carrying
fell to the ground like Creole swamp rain.
Uptown you could watch the jazz notes float
from porch swings to sidewalks of little girls
playing jump rope and hopscotch,
to old women skipping rocks
across the gulf of the Mississippi
like heartbeats they forgot they had,
while mid-city trombones
wrote love poems in lonely men’s ears.
For a year we were gardeners.
“No, Andrea, yarrow doesn’t grow here,
imagine a womb full of water,
plant like you would plant a daughter,
name her Iris, Rose, Magnolia, and Gardenia.”
You could hold the soil between your fingers
and smell gumbo and harmonicas.
Could smell po-boys and cathedrals on the same block.
“What do ya mean, you don’t talk to strangers?
Come inside and see a picture of my s
on,
he raises hell, but he’s a good one…”
Iris, Rose, Magnolia, Gardenia,
when I heard of Katrina
I thought, “The flowers, save the flowers…”
I never thought for a second
we wouldn’t save the people.
Birthday
For Jenn
At 12 years old I started bleeding with the moon
and began beating up boys who dreamed of becoming astronauts.
I fought with my knuckles white as dust,
and left bruises the shape of Salem.
There are things we know by heart.
And things we don’t.
At 13 my friend Jen tried to teach me how to blow rings of smoke.
I’d watch the nicotine rising from her lips like fading halos,
but I could never make dying beautiful.
The sky didn’t fill with colors the night I convinced myself
veins are kite strings you can only cut free.
I suppose I love this life,
in spite of my clenched fist.
I open my palm and my lifelines look like branches from an Aspen tree,
and there are songbirds perched on the tips of my fingers,
and I wonder if Beethoven held his breath
the first time his fingers touched the keys
the same way a soldier holds his breath
the first time his finger coaxes the trigger.
We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.
My lungs remember
the day my mother took my hand and placed it on her belly
and told me the symphony beneath was my baby sister’s heartbeat.
and her lungs were taking shape
And I knew life would tremble
like the first tear on a prison guard’s unturned cheek,
like a stumbling prayer on a dying man’s lips,
like a vet holding a full bottle of whisky
as if it were an empty gun in a war zone…
just take me just take me
Sometimes the scales themselves weigh far too much,
the heaviness of forever balancing blue sky with red blood.
We were all born on days when too many people died in terrible ways,
but you still have to call it a birthday.
You still have to fall for the prettiest girl on the playground at recess
and hope she knows you can hit a baseball
further than any boy in the whole third grade
and I’ve been running for home
through the windpipe of a man who sings
while his hands play washboard with a spoon
on a street corner in New Orleans
where every boarded-up window is still painted with the words
We’re Coming Back
like a promise to the ocean
that we will always keep moving towards the music,
the way Basquiat slept in a cardboard box to be closer to the rain.
Beauty, catch me on your tongue.
Thunder, clap us open.
The pupils in our eyes were not born to hide beneath their desks.
Tonight, lay us down to rest in the Arizona desert,
then wake us to wash the feet of pregnant women
who climbed across the border with their bellies aimed towards the sun.
I know a thousand things louder than a soldier’s gun.
I know the heartbeat of his mother.
There is a boy writing poems in Central Park
and as he writes he moves
and his bones become the bars of Mandela’s jail cell stretching apart,
and there are men playing chess in the December cold
who can’t tell if the breath rising from the board
is their opponents’ or their own,
and there’s a woman on the stairwell of the subway
swearing she can hear Niagara Falls from her rooftop in Brooklyn,
and I’m remembering how Niagara Falls is a city overrun
with strip-malls and traffic and vendors
and one incredibly brave river that makes it all worth it.
I know this world is far from perfect.
I am not the type to mistake a streetlight for the moon.
I know our wounds are deep as the Atlantic.
But every ocean has a shoreline
and every shoreline has a tide
that is constantly returning
to wake the songbirds in our hands,
to wake the music in our bones,
to place one fearless kiss on the mouth of that new born river
that has to run through the center of our hearts
to find its way home.
For Eli
Eli came back from Iraq
and tattooed a teddy bear onto the inside of his wrist.
Above that a medic with an IV bag,
above that an angel
but Eli says the teddy bear won’t live.
And I know I don’t know but I say, “I know.”
‘Cause Eli’s only twenty-four and I’ve never seen eyes
further away from childhood than his,
eyes old with a wisdom
he knows I’d rather not have.
Eli’s mother traces a teddy bear onto the inside of my arm
and says, “Not all casualties come home in body bags.”
And I swear,
I’d spend the rest of my life writing nothing
but the word light at the end of this tunnel
if I could find the fucking tunnel
I’d write nothing but white flags.
Somebody pray for the soldiers.
Somebody pray for what’s lost.
Somebody pray for the mailbox
that holds the official letters
to the mothers, fathers,
sisters and little brothers
of Michael 19... Steven 21... John 33.
How ironic that their deaths sound like bible verses.
The hearse is parked in the halls of the high school
recruiting black, brown and poor
while anti-war activists outside Walter Reed Army Hospital
scream, “100,000 slain,”
as an amputee on the third floor
breathes forget-me-nots onto the window pane.
But how can we forget what we never knew?
Our sky is so perfectly blue it’s repulsive.
Somebody tell me where god lives
‘cause if god is truth, god doesn’t live here.
Our lies have seared the sun too hot to live by.
There are ghosts of kids who are still alive
toting M16s with trembling hands
while we dream ourselves stars on Survivor,
another missile sets fire to the face in the locket
of a mother whose son needed money for college
and she swears she can feel his photograph burn.
How many wars will it take us to learn
that only the dead return?
The rest remain forever caught between worlds of
shrapnel shatters body of three-year-old girl
to…
welcome to McDonalds, can I take your order?
The mortar of sanity crumbling,
stumbling back home to a home that will never be home again.
Eli doesn’t know if he can ever write a poem again.
One third of the homeless men in this country are veterans.
And we have the nerve to Support Our Troops
with pretty yellow ribbons
/> while giving nothing but dirty looks to their outstretched hands.
Tell me, what land of the free
sets free its eighteen-year-old kids into greedy war zones
hones them like missiles
then returns their bones in the middle of the night
so no one can see?
Each death swept beneath the carpet and hidden like dirt,
each life a promise we never kept.
Jeff Lucey came back from Iraq
and hung himself in his parents’ basement with a garden hose.
The night before he died he spent forty-five minutes on his father’s lap
rocking like a baby,
rocking like daddy, save me,
and don’t think for a minute he too isn’t collateral damage
in the mansions of Washington.
They are watching them burn and hoarding the water.
Which senators’ sons are being sent out to slaughter?
Which presidents’ daughters are licking ashes from their lips
or dreaming up ropes to wrap around their necks
in case they ever make it home alive?
Our eyes are closed, America.
There are souls in the boots of the soldiers, America.
Fuck your yellow ribbon.
You wanna support our troops,
bring them home,
and hold them tight when they get here.
Anything
Tonight I’d swear the man in the moon is a rapist,
and stars are nothing but scars,
bullet wounds from humanity’s drive-by
firing at the face of the sky.
Tonight crying would be too easy.
It would please me too much
and no I don’t want you to touch me
‘cause your hands are clean
and I’m filthy,
guilty with the blood of something beautiful all over me.
I’ve been weak and leaking so much poison
in all the rivers around me the fish are dying,
and the trees are vying for some light
but I’m the eternal night
writing rhymes about wind chimes and world peace
while even in my sleep I’m fighting wars
that grind the enamel off my teeth
and I wake with my jaw clenched and my body bent
thinking, “How many dishes have I broken this week?”
in an attempt to not break myself
Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns Page 1