You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

One night in Ann Arbor, my friend, still undiagnosed, could not uncurl her fingers to strum her guitar, so she sang the chords instead. It was the first time in my life I’d seen pain become an instrument: 10 dozen goosebumps

There is no escaping the magic now. Beauty caught me and never let me go. And the thing about the world record is—if someone breaks it after me, and they will break it after me, I will love that so much that without even trying, I’ll break it again.

I know most people try hard to do good and find out too late they should have tried softer.

because where I come from beauty is in the eye of anyone who sees what’s missing but can’t stop pointing to what’s still there. If there’s no definition for love yet— I think that’s a good one.

Some sound advice I give myself, like, twice an hour: Wear knee pads on the way to your ego, Andrea. Being right is boring.

When I think about why we broke up, why you flew all the way to Croatia to let go of the juggling balls I made you, I know it’s because I was a terrible juggler. I couldn’t figure out how to hold something and set it free at the same time. So I dropped the ball. Convinced myself I was up in the air about you when really I was up in the air about me. It’s what we do—turn our bodies into museums of what was broken.

There is no moral of this story—there is only light and sadness. There is no moral of this story. It’s just a moment in my life where I did something wrong, and the earth, who has never not known what love is, held me anyway.

It was 1987 in a town that could have invented red hats, but the school principal gave me a gold ribbon and not a single bit of attitude about my radical political stance because neither he nor I knew it was political. Science had not yet been fully framed as leftist propaganda. The president did not have a Twitter feed starving the world of facts.

thought one hundred was the biggest number there was. My mother absolutely blew my mind the day she said, One hundred and one. One hundred AND WHAT!? 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?

I love myself is often spelled g-o-o-d-b-y-e

For years to come, nothing will have the potential to devastate me more than listening to a child try to make her life sound easier than it is.

Healing was learning no one has ever laid a fingerprint on the part of me that’s infinite.

But before you go, remember the weather almost never shifts this suddenly by itself. You’ve scoured the soil for her carbon footprint a thousand times, but have you scoured it for yours? Not to go looking for shame but to know your own impact.

In any moment, on any given day, I can measure my wellness by this question: Is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?

Everybody wants straight A’s. Give me some gay A’s to work for.* You’re talking to someone whose imaginary friends were bullies.

Do you understand? A promised land is not a promised land if I can’t keep learning.