Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns Read online

  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

  writebloody.com

  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