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Ron Gibson, Jr.
Date of Birth: 6/15/74 Location: Seattle, Washington Email: gibsonr@mindspring.com Publications: The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Poetry in Motion, The Storyteller, South County Journal, Castalian Springs, EWG Presents, Mindkites
PIROUETTE
for my V.C.
Tonight, I notice the blatant
dial tones and empty bed,
where choosing sides was an art.
Where I told you the story about
the earth's magnetism recorded in stone
and you made the connection to us.
Separate hemispheres of the same being,
attracted and repelled, in an erotic dance
of futility, greedy for balance.
You were the left half because you rose
to the pulse of a messiah. You embraced
oddities and felt awkward in your
femaleness. A poet posed as a compass,
you feared having no direction, of falling
into a limbo where electric currents coiled
like fetuses. Bent. Photons pulling the skin
of the universe up and under and around
our bodies, shivering. Drawn together in
opposition, arcing and receding, we struggled
with millenniums, storing force in the earth's
belly, like histories and loaded words, until
electricity swelled ripe between our hips,
hollowed our borders, turning against
our sameness.