You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

When I don’t believe in myself, I try to remember I have walked on water, like, seven-hundred times in Maine in the dead of winter. Where I come from, you can drive a pickup truck from one side of the lake to the other, and people have an unusually high quantity of missing teeth and fingers, but you can still count on them to buy whitening strips and wedding rings 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. I’m writing you, Friend, on a day you did me wrong. I’m only half a second outside the furnace of my rage, and I’m trying to focus my attention on all the teeth you still have, the teeth I know you’d happily knock out yourself if it would keep you from biting anyone again. That’s how mistakes work if you’re loving the right kind of people. And you’re the right kind of people. You’ve walked on water so many times you know grace is super, super slippery. There’s literally nothing anyone is more likely to fall from.

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

No matter how it looks, you and everyone you know have hourglass figures. Each breath, a falling grain of sand. To truly live is to see right through the skin to the avalanche. If we never deny the inevitable end of the story, we will write it more beautiful while we’re alive.

Friend, you are who taught me that a difficult life is not less worth living than a gentle one. Joy is just easier to carry than sorrow, and you could lift a city from how long you’ve spent holding what’s been nearly impossible to hold. This world needs those who know how to do that. Those who can find a tunnel with no light at the end of it and hold it up like a telescope to show that the darkness contains many truths that can bring the light to its knees. Grief astronomer, adjust the lens, look close. Tell us what you see.

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? Whose greed is the smog that keeps us from seeing our own nature and the sweetness