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.
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 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