You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

Of course beauty hunted me. It hunts everyone. But I outran it, hid in worry, regret, the promise of an afterlife or a week’s end.

She took a breath before speaking, and I could hear god being born in that breath.

It was the first time in my life I’d seen pain become an instrument:

and I think we make gods who look like us for a reason.

I couldn’t figure out how to hold something and set it free at the same time.

I see I wasn’t running from the war back then. I was running from the peace.

How many days did we need each other at the same time without knowing it?

Bitterness is the easiest way to leave this world having had only a near-life experience.

You were told five times more often you’d go to hell when you died.

I tie that page to the end of a kite string and run a crooked line through the straightest mile of the Bible Belt.

There are many days I thirst for my own silence but walk through the desert screaming instead because I, like most of my queer friends, don’t have a child —I have millions—from Nebraska to Chechnya,

To know there is no universe in which they would not be proud of their own children.

Silence rides shotgun wherever hate goes.

Friend, you are who taught me that a difficult life is not less worth living than a gentle one.

It’s okay if you can’t imagine spring.

I’d say the moment lasted a lifetime, but no one lives that long.

whose thorns were my very first heroes because they did nothing with their life but protect what was sweet.

Billionaires never grow out of doing that same math with years. Can’t conceive of counting past their own lifespans. Believe the world ends the day they do.

Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts?

None of that is poetry. It is just the earth being who she is in spite of us stamping barcodes on the sea.

Yes, I say, there is nothing you have ever grown that isn’t music.

Who, more than the earth, has bled for us?

We need so much less than we take. We owe so much more than we give.

If someday I have a mustache, I know I’ll be comfortable wearing a dress. And if I ever have a beard, I’m certain I’ll be the prettiest girl I’ve ever been.

applied for the night shift in an attempt to trick myself into believing that sleeping through the day was healthy.

illness was a relationship I could never manage to leave.

I could not divorce my body from its pain.

but it was the softest, too, one heart stopping to tell another heart, I’m coming with you.

but my voice is alive and right now it is the only justice system I trust

Can’t we please let god keep her secrets?

I pray to a different god every single day because I pray to me,

And what you do is you live until you die.

the geese are just beginning to make their long trip south. They fly in a perfect > but they do not think what is ahead of them is greater or less than what is behind them. That, you are certain, is the definition of peace.

But you’re done making vacations out of people.

Is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?

a small town where dreams never come true, so nobody ever stops dreaming.

A place where you are loved not for how well you sing but for your willingness to pick a song everyone will want to sing with you.

was comforted in the knowing that I had a million mistakes still in me to learn from.

Who wants to be today who they were yesterday?

I know someone, somewhere, is pointing to a speck of light that is our tiny blue planet and saying, I bet that planet is capable of sustaining life. And for now, they’d be right.