Tour Buses are Expensive
now, normally I would say
huffing glue is bad for you
unless you need a deeper
connection with your mother
she’s beautiful when she laughs
high on those green carpeted
walls, rolling around in an
old Opryland bus
repurposed for the Lord’s work
you heard me, that’s right
these people were drunk on carpet glue
after they formed a gospel band
needed transportation
a way to get to holy places in
Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia
churches with no plumbing
only wild packs of dogs
The Bunk Beds Were my Favorite Part
the problem with bunk beds in
a gospel tour bus is
stop lights because there are
no seatbelts for performers or their children
carpet burn sometimes got
my face, my knees, my elbows
ha, I rolled all the way up to
my father, the bus driver
gazed up to him from my position
on the floor under the swirling
door handle, the kind you think of
when you imagine bus doors opening
soldiers coming home
Rosa Parks birthed out of those doors
a new woman
I’m not quite a woman, but
I do have a father
he drove an old Opryland bus to
churches in the woods
Womb Renovation
take me back to being seven years old
high on carpet glue fumes
renovating a broken-down theme park
bus that once carried people away
from their own automobiles and
closer to joy
we were inside joy, and she was
carpeted green—green fuzzies in
my hair as we laughed ourselves silly
I have a body
I had a body then, and it was warm
my eyes cried from chemicals and
from actually being ludacris
with my mother
this is where I go when I imagine
my body coming from a mother
we were inside her
a new mother called joy
on her chest crying
this is why people do drugs