Trellis Songtext
von Andrea Gibson

There is a reason my body creaks like a closing casket
Every time I fuck with the lights left on
It is the same reason my friend sets fire to photographs of birds
And follows the smoke with pleading eyes
We both had years when the phoenix didn′t rise
When we slept in beds of cindered feathers
And held hollow ashen beaks
The way other kids hold ice cream cones

I sucked the bones of a songbird's rotting wing
And you think your pills are gonna fix me, doctor

You think I′m gonna chase this down with water
The shame as loud as his next girl's nightmares
I tied my tongue like laces in my baby brother's shoes
Like a bow around a gift I gave to my father and mother
And my silence equaled every Christmas morning
Where we were still happy and grateful
But my silence was also his next girl′s eyes


Falling like timber where no one chose to hear
Her roots ripped up, her ground eroding
To the din of an old man′s zipper

Twenty years later I wake in damp sheets
My body trembling to the ghost of her voice
Cracking like a frozen lake
And I don't even know her name
Never saw her face
Only heard the rumor that he′d moved on
To the hemorrhage of another perfect thing

And now here I sing through cinder
Through microphones raised like white flags in war zones
Through poems I have dug from my throat like fishing hooks
From here I look back at my voice lowered to half-mast
How he must have stood there with his dirty hand on his dirty heart
Laughing like a broken levee
As his next girl woke with body bags beneath her eyes
And enough shame in her gut to give the hurricane her own name

If I could see her face
If I could face the eye of her storm
How would I ever tell her that I speak for a living?

Would I offer my own wounds as condolence?


Would I say his claws carved me animal?
Would I say at fourteen years old
I threw my bloody fist into my boyfriend's face
Till his eyes swelled shut and his tears turned crimson
And his jaw cracked
Till I was finally convinced his hands were not every man′s hands?
Would I tell her I have stood beneath street lamps
Waiting for the swarming flies to identify my body as carcass
To swallow every cell of salt
And leave nothing behind but the trellis of my untouched bones?

I remember the fault lines in the corners of his eyes
The way he shook hands with my father

The look on his face beneath the swollen sun

Even his shadow looked guilty
The concrete made crime scene by his touch
Would I tell her this?
Would I ask if she has ever outlined her own body in chalk?
Is there yellow tape in your top dresser drawer
For those nights when your true love's
Kiss is an anthem to a dead country
And you find yourself with rope burns around your neck
Begging the bodies of strangers to not respect you in the morning?

In the morning I shovel my blood from the white snow
I wipe my frantic breath from the window
And I bind my breasts so that something will hold my breath so tight
Not even the air in my lungs could be identified as woman

Woman, are you a carbon copy of myself?
Is there a boy inside you painting his cells
With the charcoal of cindered feathers
So he will never again glow in the dark the way girls do?
Woman, if I knew your name
If I could face the eye of your storm
And the warning locked in my voice box that never came
Would I tell you all of this?
And after that, would I ever find the nerve to admit
That even if I could, I wouldn′t take my silence back?

My father owned a gun
He would have blown that man apart
My mother owned a mother's heart
Everything would have broken
Everything but you