Wordless

Ashes by Andrea Gibson

The night I was torn from the pages of their Bible

and burned alive

my ashes came down like snow

and a girl who had never seen my face

saw me falling from the sky

and laid down on her back to make an angel

in the powder of my bones

From heaven, I watched her,

‘though my eyes were still flame

and my ribs were still blue,

they didn’t win, I whispered

as her arms built my wings

they didn’t win

Look at that moon

it is a pebble in my hand

tonight, I could skip it across that fog-drunk sea

to the lashes accordion in the night

and all they know of hate

is that it couldn’t beat the love out of me

that when they dropped me to the grave,

I fell like a bucket in to a well

and came up full;

carving my lover’s name in to the skin of a weeping willow

that had spent its entire life laughing at the rain

Hold me like a lantern;

staircase my spine

When they bring the children to my funeral

to scream faggot at my dust

tell them

I was born in to their casket

but I wouldn’t pull the splinters from my heart

any more than Christ

would’ve pulled the thorns from his crimson head

They can come a thousand times

with their burning match

and their gasoline

with their hungry laws

and their empty mouths

full of prayers

to that God that greeted me at his gates

with his throat full of trumpets

and his tears full of shame

as his trembling palms

collected the cinder of his children’s crime

I know what Holy is

I know that the soul is shaped like a bowl;

I know the lies we try to fill it with

and we spill too often the orchards inside

but my lover’s shoes were tied with guitar strings

and when I walked beside

there was a silo in my chest;

there was a field full of sun;

there was a river full of gold

that we left

to pick our sweet hearts from the trees

that kept uprooting tombstones

so the names of the dead

would crumble in to poems

Write me down like this:

say my ashes never made the news;

say the jury was full of shotguns

and say the snow that fell on the tip of your tongue

refused to melt away

say this

to the kids hiding their heart beats

from their father’s fists

I planted the garden of my kiss;

I opened the night with my teeth;

I loved so hard that when they pressed their ear to the track,

the train they hear coming will still be my chest -

a rumbling harpoon; a sky they can not bury

Look at that moon

I am a pebble in her hand;

a harmonica held to the mouth of the river where

nothing

ever

burns