Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns Read online

  you hate that I call breasts boobs

  and say you’re tired of dating a 12-year-old boy,

  but god, your boobs bring me joy.

  Though I could live forever between the lines of your teeth

  and eat nothing but memory and purge myself clean.

  You are a dream.

  We are a nightmare sometimes.

  But if you wake up terrified

  I’ll be there to hold you,

  fold you in the pockets of my faith

  and say, “We’ll be ok.”

  Hook Line

  There are stars in your dark side

  brighter than the sun.

  Promise me, if you ever catch your breath

  you will throw it back out to sea immediately.

  Dive

  .

  Life doesn’t rhyme.

  It’s bullets... and wind chimes.

  It’s lynchings... and birthday parties.

  It’s the rope that ties the noose

  and the rope that hangs the backyard swing.

  It’s wanting tonight to speak the most honest poem

  I’ve ever spoken in my life

  not knowing if that poem should bring you closer

  to living or dying.

  Last night I prayed myself to sleep,

  woke this morning to find god’s obituary

  scrolled in tears on my sheets

  then walked outside to hear my neighbor

  erasing ten thousand years of hard labor

  with a single note of his violin

  and the sound of the traffic rang like a hymn

  as the holiest leaf of autumn

  fell from a plastic tree limb, beautiful

  and ugly.

  Like right now I’m needing nothing more than for you to hug me

  and if you do I’m gonna scream like a caged bird.

  Life doesn’t rhyme.

  Sometimes love is a vulgar word.

  .

  I’ve heard saints preaching truths

  that would have burned me at the stake.

  I’ve heard poets telling lies that made me believe in heaven.

  Sometimes I imagine Hitler at seven years old,

  a paint brush in his hand at school

  thinking, “What color should I paint my soul?”

  Sometimes I remember myself

  with track marks on my tongue

  from shooting up convictions

  that would have hung innocent men from trees.

  Have you ever seen a mother falling to her knees

  the day her son dies in a war she voted for?

  Can you imagine how many gay teen-aged lives were saved

  the day Matthew Shepard died?

  Could there have been anything louder

  than the noise inside his father’s head

  when he begged the jury, “Please don’t take the lives

  of the men who turned my son’s skull to powder.”

  And I know nothing would make my family prouder

  than if I gave up everything I believe in

  but nothing keeps me believing

  like the sound of my mother breathing.

  Life doesn’t rhyme.

  It’s tasting your rapist’s breath

  on the neck of a woman who loves you more

  than anyone has loved you before

  then feeling holy as Mary

  beneath the hands of a one-night stand

  who’s calling somebody else’s name.

  It’s you never feeling more greedy

  than when you’re handing out dollars to the needy.

  It’s my not eating meat for the last ten years

  then seeing the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life

  on the face of a man with a branding iron in his hand

  and a beat-down baby calf wailing at his feet.

  It’s choking on your beliefs.

  It’s your worst sin saving your fucking life.

  It’s the devil’s knife carving holes into your soul

  so angels will have a place to make their way inside.

  Life doesn’t rhyme.

  Life is poetry, not math.

  All the world’s a stage

  but the stage is a meditation mat.

  You tilt your head back.

  You breathe.

  When your heart is broken you plant seeds in the cracks

  and you pray for rain.

  And you teach your sons and daughters

  there are sharks in the water

  but the only way to survive

  is to breathe deep

  and dive.

  Titanic

  I grew up in the town that received the first distress signal

  saying the Titanic was going down.

  It was the only thing we were ever renowned for.

  In fact, we prided ourselves on our failure to save the sinking

  which is maybe part of the reason I prided myself

  on drinking my first fifth of whisky at eleven years old.

  It’s cold where I come from.

  I learned to drown young.

  At fourteen I showed up to my 8 am high school art class so drunk

  my art teacher took a month-long sabbatical to reevaluate

  her ability to make the world a better place.

  When she returned she had a face like a gravestone

  with an already-passed death date.

  I sometimes wonder if I killed her.

  Which is maybe part of the reason

  I sometimes paint this world prettier than it is.

  Have you ever had the feeling you owe somebody somewhere

  a really good reason to live?

  To grow old?

  To be ninety-eight-and-a-half

  with a laugh like broken glass

  so whenever folks walk barefoot

  they’ll get hidden pieces embedded in their souls?

  I’ve spent too many years

  sewing my tears together with thread

  and hanging them like Christmas lights,

  spent too many nights watching the sunset

  on the edge of a knife’s glint

  to wanna let myself or anybody else drown anymore,

  so call this poem shore

  that when the message in the bottle finally arrives

  it’s not gonna ask what broke us in half,

  it’s gonna ask us why we survived.

  Why did Rumi dance when his beloved died?

  Why did children search Hiroshima’s sky for the moon

  when their wounds were still open as hope’s suicide note,

  when the clouds were still bleeding?

  Why did Frida Kahlo sculpt a paintbrush from her scars?

  My mother says the thing about wheelchairs

  is they keep you looking up.

  Says forests may be gorgeous

  but there’s nothing more alive

  than a tree that grows in a cemetery

  and sometimes it’s the cup that’s half empty

  that fills the heart so full

  it could pull a bow

  above the strings of a row of combat boots

  and make them sing like a pair of lovers calling each other’s names

  into the echo of the Grand Canyon.

  Three years ago my niece’s eyes

  kept the needle from my sister’s veins

  for the very first time.

  If I could collect that day,

  the sweat from her shaking palms,

  the cramps knotting like a noose in her gut

>   I would have the stuff of monarchs taking flight,

  of nights when the smoke of burning flags

  floats across our borders like a kiss.

  It hit 170 degrees in the locked trailer of the truck

  when the women locked hands and sang so hard

  the Texas desert shook

  like the hearts of the folks

  who would find them still alive.

  Why did Rumi dance?

  We have cried so hard our tears have left scars on our cheekbones,

  but who finds their way home by the short cuts?

  You wrote your first song on a homophobe’s fist.

  She wrote her first poem on her mother’s dying wish.

  Sometimes the deepest breaths

  are pulled from the bottom of the ocean floor,

  and if the soul is a mosaic of all our broken pieces

  I won’t shine my rusted edges.

  I’ll just meet you on the shore.

  Stay

  Stay.

  There are snowflakes on my tongue

  I want to melt on your inner thigh.

  There’s a face in the moon

  I still call Jesus some nights.

  My body is a temple where I’ve burned so many scriptures

  I see smoke every time I look in the mirror.

  Kiss me where the flames turned blue.

  Tell me there are places on my skin

  that look exactly like the sky

  and your heart is a jet plane

  heavy with the weight of businessmen and crying babies

  but you’re done running for the exit row.

  ‘Cause god knows we have smoked the stars,

  made wishes on falling ashes.

  Something’s gotta give,

  it may as well be our fingers.

  Touch me ‘til my ribs become piano keys,

  ‘til there is sheet music scrolled across the inside of my lungs

  ‘cause I’m breaking old patterns.

  For anyone else I would rhyme and end this line with saturn,

  but you are not the type to wear rings,

  and I’m not the type to want to celebrate forever

  when Right Now is forever walking down the aisle unnoticed.

  Hold me.

  Sing me lullabies at dawn

  when I’ve been up all night painting the wind

  to remind myself that things are moving.

  We were talking mountains and snowboards

  when you said, “I’ll teach you how to fall.”

  I said, “I bet you will.”

  But my bruises will be half-moons

  hanging above corn fields

  that grow only crop circles.

  You are a mystery I promise I will never try to solve.

  What science calls science I have always called miracle

  and since we first met I have said “thank you” so many times

  I have watched all of my broken pieces

  curling into notes to plant themselves

  in the soil of clarinets on street corners

  in the French Quarter

  you can find music

  in places where you cannot find air.

  So when you say you are homesick for my skin

  my body sends you postcards from all its darkest corners

  and prays you will still see the sun

  climbing my bones like octaves,

  ‘cause baby, there were nights when my pulse did not win,

  nights when my heartbeat stained the kitchen floor bright red.

  But you once told me

  we are most alive in that split second before death,

  so I call “ugly” a four letter word

  and tell you I am tired of hearing myself swear.

  Beauty

  is in the eye of the beholder.

  You hold me so well

  that I am almost convinced

  that smoke in the mirror

  might one day disappear.

  Marble

  I once had sex with a very large woman

  at the very very tip of a long quiet pier

  while a herd of stranded sailors cheered us on

  from a navy boat a hundred feet away

  and that is just one of those things

  I don’t need to tell my mother.

  But

  there are other things I do need to tell her,

  you, Mother.

  ‘Cause I have been half a decade now

  falling slow from the hands of your letting go,

  crashing down upon the pages of our separation

  where you’ve written me into paragraphs of

  short-haired dirty-hippie man-hating queer.

  And I wonder if you even remember my name.

  ‘Cause every minute of every day

  I can still hear you calling it from our window

  through the wind of my ten-year-old sky,

  “Andrea, it’s time to come home…”

  But I haven’t been home in years.

  And every memory of you is a halt,

  a clot where all my blood-rushing veins just stop,

  and most days I can’t remember how to bleed.

  But always, through it all

  I have always breathed you

  like the greatest breath I ever took.

  The way I looked at you,

  followed you in circles round the spiral

  of your every single step, never missing a thing.

  The way you would laugh, smile

  sing me awake in the morning,

  always crashing through my door without warning,

  “Wake up, wake up, you sleepy head…”

  And then you’d leave

  as I pulled my tired body from the bed,

  walked down the hall to find you

  always in the middle of the living room

  standing on your head,

  your feet grinning at the ceiling, you’d say,

  “Don’t think so much, you’re gonna suffocate your feelings.

  Don’t think so much, go out and play.”

  I remember the day I watched you carry

  bucket after bucket of paint down the stairs

  to our dark dingy basement.

  Hours later you called me there to where you stood

  pointing two dripping sticks at the once colorless walls.

  “Look,” you whispered.

  “Fairies turned our basement to marble…”

  And I marveled in you.

  Always I marveled in you.

  My mother,

  rising from the ashes.

  You were more than a phoenix.

  You were the whole magnificent flock,

  with your hundred thousand wings

  shimmering light through the sky and I

  wanted to be just like you.

  But isn’t it frightening what years will do

  to even a spirit spun in the very velvet of song?

  Isn’t it frightening the way light will let go

  of a heart that was once forever dancing,

  releasing you now to the metal mold of constructed ideas

  where fear somehow holding you from me

  now folds you into terms

  of Conservative Republican Christian,

  while even Jesus knows

  I was never born from any adjective,

  I was born from you.

  And I couldn’t care less what you believe,

  if only you would just believe in me,

  ‘cause I am still carrying round our chord.
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br />   I am still shrouding myself in the lost chorus of your womb

  hoping someday soon you will look and finally see me.

  Look.

  I am that little girl you held at three,

  that almost-woman at seventeen.

  I am that woman at sixty who will sit by your side

  and hold your hand while you die.

  I am that woman now.

  And if you forever choose to shred the blankets of our blood

  with the knives that hold our differences

  we will both forever sleep cold.

  But I will never forget the perfect warmth of you soul.

  Will never forget my mother knew

  that fairies danced on basement walls

  and her song

  the way she sang it when she woke me

  would take me to a place

  where feet could walk on ceilings

  and feelings were always smarter things than thoughts.

  And I am always

  that woman’s daughter.

  Tonight

  Offer your body as a burning building

  without fire escapes.

  I want to feel you like lifelines

  on the palms of Christ

  when the nails went through.

  Photograph

  I wish I was a photograph

  tucked into the corners of your wallet,

  a snapshot carried like a future in your back pocket.

  I wish I was that face you show to strangers

  when they ask you where you come from,

  that someone that you come from

  every time you get there,

  and when you get there

  I wish I was that someone who got phone calls

  and postcards saying

  wish you were here.

  I wish you were here.

  Autumn is the hardest season.

  The leaves are all falling

  and they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground

  and the trees are naked and lonely.

  I keep trying to tell them

  new leaves will come around in the spring,

  but you can’t tell trees those things,

  they’re like me,

  they just stand there

  and don’t listen.

  I wish you were here.

  I’ve been hazy-eyed

  staring at the bottom of my glass again,

  thinking of that time when it was so full

  it was like we were tapping the moon for moonshine

  or sticking straws into the center of the sun