You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

My every pore reached out like a hand pointing to the first unsinkable lotus in the bayou of the universe.

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

I love you because we have both showed up to kindness tryouts with notes from the school nurse that said we were too hurt to participate. But we learned how wrong we were, and weren’t those the best days?

I hack high school curriculums and delete every test that does not ask what the P in Marsha P. Johnson stands for.

P = “Pay It No Mind”

What if we don’t have to be healed to be whole?

I read that people scream when they are in pain because screaming actually lessens the pain— anyone who asks you to hold your tongue is asking you to hold the heaviest thing in the galaxy.

I understand being wooed by the finish line of sadness. Infinity still sends me nudes every day.

INSTEAD OF DEPRESSION try calling it hibernation. Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing. Hibernating animals don’t even dream. It’s okay if you can’t imagine spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world. Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead of a grave.

I’m seventy-six years old, he said, and I just tonight figured out what love is.

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

Because if the heart of the earth is in Arizona, the Grand Canyon is proof of how badly it is breaking.

That every falling leaf is a tiny kite with a string too small to see, held by the part of me in charge of making beauty out of grief.

its autumn leaves blinking like two thousand yellow lights begging me to slow down