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.

There is no escaping the magic now. Beauty caught me and never let me go.

If we never deny the inevitable end of the story, we will write it more beautiful while we’re alive.

What if we don’t have to be healed to be whole? There are holes in every inch of the fabric that makes me who I am, but pull the string on my back and I’ll say I LOVE YOU and mean it whenever you want.

your own story is one you aren’t sure you can survive, remove whatever sharpness you can from another person’s life.

You can die from a broken heart, but the opposite is also true.

If every heart-worthy novelist weeps for days before killing off a beloved character, god must have spent centuries sobbing before pressing a pen to the page of this year.