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, 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.
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