Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns

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Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns Page 4

by Andrea Gibson


  and sipping like Icarus would forever kiss

  the bullets from our guns.

  I never meant to fire, you know.

  I know you never meant to fire, lover.

  Now the sky clicks from black to blue

  and dusk looks like a bruise.

  I’ve been wrapping one night stands

  around my body like wedding bands

  but none of them fit in the morning,

  they just slip off my fingers and slip out the door

  and all that lingers is the single scent of you.

  Do you remember the night I told you

  I’ve never seen anything more perfect than

  than snow falling in the sodium glow of a street light,

  electricity bowing to nature,

  mind bowing to heartbeat,

  This is gonna hurt bowing to I love you.

  I still love you

  like moons love the planets they circle around,

  like children love recess bells,

  I hear the sound of you

  and think of playgrounds

  where outcasts who stutter

  beneath braces and bruises and acne

  are finally learning that their rich handsome bullies

  are never gonna grow up to be happy.

  I think of happy when I think of you.

  So wherever you are, I hope you’re happy,

  I really do.

  I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight.

  I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking.

  I hope your lungs are open and breathing this life.

  I hope there’s a kite in your hand

  that’s flying all the way up to Orion

  and you still have a thousand yards of string to let out.

  I hope you’re smiling

  like god is pulling at the corners of your mouth.

  ‘Cause I might be naked and lonely,

  shaking branches for bones,

  but I’m still time zones away

  from who I was the day before we met.

  You were the first mile where my heart broke a sweat.

  And I wish you were here.

  I wish you’d never left.

  The Yoga Instructor

  When the yoga instructor broke Natalie’s heart

  she started hanging out at the Holocaust Museum

  hoping to put her own pain into perspective.

  On the phone I did not tell her

  how I fell in love

  the day George Bush was elected President,

  and how I fell asleep that night

  wrapped in the sweetest peace

  I had ever known.

  See Through

  We’re on our way back to school from gymnastics class.

  The kids are singing John Lennon’s Imagine

  at the back of the bus,

  and only in Boulder, Colorado

  Jesse stops herself mid-verse,

  stretches her arm across the aisle like a sunbeam,

  tugs at the hem of my shirt and asks,

  “What does hatred mean?”

  Jesse’s five years old.

  Anything I say, she’s gonna believe.

  But I realize I don’t know the answers.

  I don’t know what hatred means.

  I could guess and say it’s the opposite of love.

  I could guess and say,

  “Jesse, hatred is wanting nothing but white faces

  on our private-school bus.”

  But Jesse isn’t white yet.

  Go ahead and ask her.

  “What color are you, Jesse?”

  “Well, it looks like I’m pink.”

  Shane thinks he’s orange.

  Skylar says she’s tan.

  Rhett says he’s see-through.

  “See, you can see how my veins are blue

  but they’re red when I bleed.”

  And I wish there was no such thing as springtime.

  ‘Cause I don’t trust the machines

  that will one day be planting seeds in these gardens

  teaching them that some people are flowers

  some people are weeds,

  rip the weeds by their roots

  ignore their screams

  tilt your own face to the sun

  take what you want,

  you are the chosen ones.

  I wanna tell Jesse that Sitting Bull was wrong

  when he said that white people are liars and thieves.

  I wanna tell her we didn’t come like a time bomb,

  gunpowder on our breath,

  teeth built like bullets,

  that this land didn’t weep when our feet

  first mercilessly hit the ground.

  I don’t wanna say we drowned and maimed the children,

  sliced long strips of their skin for bridle reigns.

  I don’t wanna say the moon was slain,

  the constellations dispersed like shrapnel.

  Jesse, mothers killed their babies, then killed themselves

  when they saw our faces on the horizon

  and all that we left was a trail of tears.

  But if I have to say that

  I wanna say our boats stopped there.

  I wanna say the waves never saw the sails of slave ships,

  never heard the sound of chain links,

  but Jesse, think slaughterhouse.

  Think people branded, suffocating, foaming at the mouth.

  Can you imagine what kind of pain you would have to endure

  to throw yourself overboard 1200 miles out to sea?

  Lungs gratefully exchanging breath for saltwater,

  gratefully trading life for death.

  Can you imagine being chained to your dead daughter?

  How many days would it take you to stop

  searching her hands for lifelines?

  To stop searching her fingertips for memories of sunshine?

  To stop searching her wrists for a pulse,

  for just some sign of time turning backwards

  to when you just knew

  people would never do things like this?

  And Jesse this

  is not just a picture our history,

  not just a picture of our past.

  We’ve been hundreds of years

  measuring the size of their hearts

  by the size of our fists,

  erecting our bliss on the broken backs of dark skin.

  The present is far from gift-wrapped.

  Ask mothers in the Bronx

  chasing rats out of their babies’ cribs.

  Ask the fathers of the kids

  whose lives we exchange for cheap gas.

  Ask our prisons why jail bars always come in black.

  Ask the woman in Thailand whose cancer builds our laptops.

  Ask the Mexican man working in a field fertilized by nerve gas.

  Ask his daughter when she’s born without fingers

  or hands to pray with.

  (ask me how long I could keep going with this list)

  God might be watching,

  but we are not.

  You are white, Jesse.

  There are bodies dangling

  from the limbs of your family tree.

  Our people pull people from their soil like weeds.

  Breathe in our story.

  Force yourself to hold it in your lungs

  ‘til you can hear our hymns sung beneath white sheets.

  Feel yourself fire as they shout.

  Do not look away as bullet enters heartbeat.
<
br />   Now breathe out.

  This is where we come from.

  This is still where we are.

  Now, where will we go from here?

  I don’t believe we’re hateful.

  I think we’re just asleep.

  But when we wake we can’t call up the dead and say,

  “Sorry, we were looking the other way.”

  There are names and faces behind our apathy,

  eulogies beneath our choices.

  There are voices deep as roots

  thundering unquestionable truth

  through the white noise that pacifies our ears.

  Don’t tell me we can’t hear.

  Don’t tell me we don’t hear.

  When the moon is slain,

  when the constellations disperse like shrapnel,

  don’t you think it’s time

  something changed?

  Every Month

  Every month when I get my period

  I breathe a sigh of relief and thank god I’m not pregnant,

  ‘cause you never know when Jesus is coming back

  and you never know who god’s gonna choose

  to be the next Virgin Mary

  and can you imagine anything more scary

  than staring down between your legs

  and seeing the little glowing head of baby Jesus?

  Holy shit, no thank you.

  I mean, what kind of bumper sticker would you get?

  ‘Your son’s an honor student? Yeah well,

  my son walks on water and heals lepers motherfuckers!’

  Think of the pressure.

  Personally I’d prefer to give birth to Lucifer,

  a fixer-upper, the kind of kid who would sit at the last supper

  and complain that Peter got more mashed potatoes,

  ‘cause god knows

  the holy have done more damage to this world

  than the devil ever could.

  The Moon Is A Kite

  From the other end of the phone line

  my little sister says, “Andrea, poppy flowers are beautiful.”

  I say, “You’re right.”

  And I want to say,

  “and landmines look like toys to children

  until their limbs explode,

  and their families find their bodies

  in ditches on the side of the road.”

  Our mother is crying herself to sleep again tonight.

  Your daughter is in my arms wondering where you are.

  In the morning the sunbeams will look like jail bars.

  Please come back.

  Please.

  I’ll breathe I love you into your bloodstream

  until the needles can’t compare.

  I’ll tether my veins into thread

  and stitch them through your torn seams.

  I’ll scream LIGHT into your bruises,

  still lives beneath your track marks.

  You can stand on the cliff of my heart

  and shout nothing but ugly through me

  I promise all I will echo back is

  “Beauty, beauty, you have always been beauty.”

  Did I ever tell you on the day you were born

  I stopped believing in Jesus

  and started believing in You?

  And sometimes it’s the metal in the wind chimes

  that reminds us how soft the breeze is.

  So even when you grew like a switchblade,

  pupils dilating the apocalypse,

  more junk in your veins than blood,

  more rage on your lips than love,

  I still believed in you.

  I knew you blew this world a kiss

  and no one blew it back

  and I wish I had a roadmap

  back to that time before the first time

  you mainlined midnight in search of an escape.

  I wish I’d had your back that night.

  I wish I’d told you, “Life is gonna hold you at gunpoint,

  but time usually comes with a white flag.”

  ‘Cause right now there’s a body bag around the sky

  and every time your daughter cries

  I see chalk outlines of crucified angels,

  and I’m not sure I’m strong enough for this.

  I can see the veins in my wrists too clearly

  we’re more alike than you know,

  but your daughter’s heart is beating.

  I can see her pulse in the soft spot

  on the top of her head.

  In the other room our mother is asleep and dreaming now

  of the way we were when we too were just babies like her,

  and maybe we’ll never be that new again.

  Maybe there will always be days when the sunbeams look like jail bars.

  Maybe it will seem we have more scars than lifelines sometimes,

  but I’ve found it’s always worth trying to find a way

  to walk away from the land mines

  and hope you come back

  with your skin intact enough to drink the moonshine, girl.

  I know you think this world is too dark to even dream in color,

  but I’ve seen flowers bloom at midnight.

  I’ve seen kites fly in gray skies

  and they were real close to looking like the sunrise,

  and sometime it takes the most wounded wings

  the most broken things

  to notice how strong the breeze is,

  how precious the flight.

  So I’m still not believing in Jesus.

  I’m still believing in You.

  I’m still telling your daughter,

  “The moon is a kite

  attached to a string

  that’s held by your mother

  and I promise she’s coming back soon.”

  El Mozote

  El Salvador, 1981.

  In the village of El Mozote

  the twilight sun was falling slow

  behind the mountain’s red earth.

  December soil giving birth

  to the stretching necks of noble pines, rising

  falling shedding humble shadows upon the golden corn fields below

  but the day’s tender glow told nothing

  of the dark fear of the people

  hiding horrified in their homes.

  And then the soldiers came.

  The soldiers came in the name of cleansing,

  cleansing their country free

  of potential communist rebels.

  Plan was, if they couldn’t catch the fish

  then they were gonna drain the sea.

  So they pounded on the village doors

  with the butts of their M16s,

  “Get out here now!”

  ‘til every person in the village was mouth-down in the dirt.

  And the soldiers shouted questions

  while mothers trembled and the children cried

  and the fathers begged for their lives,

  begged for their families to live, “We are an innocent people,

  we have not taken sides, we have no answers to give.”

  And they had no answers to give.

  So when night dropped its ebony skirt

  the people of El Mozote were still

  mouth-down in the dirt.

  And there had never been a night so long,

  sleepless with terror, the darkness drew on and on

  so when dawn finally sprinkled her first shards of light

  the people of the village

  having lived through the night

  dared
, for a moment, hope.

  But no.

  The slaughter began with the men.

  Fathers, brothers, grandfathers, sons,

  not one was left alive.

  Beheaded with machetes, their crimson corpses

  were stacked and stacked and stacked in piles,

  while each mother clutched her child to her chest

  praying, “Jesus save us, Jesus save us.”

  They couldn’t imagine the terror coming next.

  The children were hung from trees,

  tossed in the air and caught

  on the bloodied blades of bayonets.

  The women were slaughtered with M16s,

  as their ten-year-old daughters

  writhed in heaving pain beneath the soldiers’ brutal sex,

  their screams futile as the soft seams of their flesh

  tore and ripped to fit the gang-raping warheads

  of a sin no god would ever forgive.

  And there has never been a sound more terrible,

  more impossibly unbearable

  than the desperate shrill of the death

  piercing hour after hour the miles of El Salvador’s hills,

  and still, beneath it all,

  like breath rises from shattered chests

  and wings rise from burning nests

  beneath it all

  one little girl sang.

  Through the slaughter of her father

  and the slaughter of her mother,

  a day howling a horror like no other

  she sang.

  As solider after soldier drilled her body

  with his phallic hate,

  she sang through rape after rape after brutal rape,

  as everything around her bled desperate with cries

  the little girl sang hymns to the sky.

  She sang ‘til they shot her in the chest,

  and still she sang like the blessed of the blessed.

  She sang ‘til they shot her again

  and even then as she choked on her blood she sang.

  She sang ‘til they slit her throat.

  And she was only one of over 900 innocent people

  tortured and killed that day at the massacre at El Mozote,

  funded by the USA.

  A crime covered up and denied by our government for years

  because the killers were trained

  in the School of the Americas, Ft. Benning, Georgia.

  And now as the militia of the red, white, and blue

  treads the guilty waters of another bloody slaughter

  our nation’s government is still hiding

 

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