Lord of the Butterflies

by Andrea Gibson

You don’t want a soft death. You want a hard life that is your life.

But then I met you and I started feeling myself open, started feeling my yes coming back, the reverse of being haunted, like taking a deep breath and pulling the fog off the glass.

something that will hold me to my word when I tell Cupid I intend to keep walking out to the tip of his arrow, to bend it back toward myself, to aim for my goodness until the muscle in my chest tears from the stretch of becoming what I came here to be: a lover

I feel that sometimes when I’m writing poems—like they don’t yet fit.

Goddammit, I miss believing in everything. Who wants a universe where things are what they are? The sun doesn’t actually rise, the scientist says. The earth is just rotating on its axis.

I couldn’t take a compliment without feeling like a thief,

You’d touch me and I’d collect the fingerprints for proof that the past would never run itself dry, that love would always be watering a wound, that pain would never be a dead thing I could pull up by its roots.

Do you know science just proved an atom can exist in two places at the same time? No one is ever only at the scene of their crimes. Each of us is always also somewhere holy. You are always with me. I am always with you.