& Breathe Deep;;

Titanic by Andrea Gibson

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

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 in drinking my first fifth of whiskey at  11 years old.

It’s cold where I come from.

I learned to drown young.

At 14 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 grave stone 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 98 and a half with a laugh like broken glass so whenever folks walk barefoot, they get hidden pieces embedded in their soles.

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 new Orleans carry saxophones on their backs as they swam for their lives?

Why did children search Hiroshima’s sky

for the moon when their wounds were still open as hope’s suicide note

when the stars were still bleeding?

Why did Friends Kahlo sculpt the paintbrush from her scars?

My mother?

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 the 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 combat boot and make it sing,

like God cutting loose on the dance floor of heaven.

2 yrs 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’d have the stuff of monarchs taking flight,

of nights when the smoke of burning flags

floats across our borders like a kiss.

It hit one hundred and seventy 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?

Why did New Orleans carry saxophones on their backs?

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

But who finds their way home by the shortcuts?

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

You wrote your first poem on your mother’s dying wish.

I wrote this line on my own slit wrist.

Sometimes,

it’s the metal in the wind chimes that reminds us how soft the breeze is.

Sometimes

it’s when we’re lost that we realize we arrive,

that the soul is a mosaic of a thousand different pieces

I will meet you in the cracks,

I will meet you where the heart tears itself in half

to fit the sun inside.

I will meet you where we shine

where we shine,

where we fucking shine.