Andrea Gibson Feminist Poet & Activist

Andrea Gibson
Andrea Gibson is a  feminist poet, her verse is at once personal,
 political, feminist and universal..

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 sciptures

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 your fingers.

Touche me 'till my ribs become piano keys,

'till 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 aisles 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 the 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 the 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.