You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

She took a breath before speaking, and I could hear god being born in that breath. My every pore reached out like a hand pointing to the first unsinkable lotus in the bayou of the universe. I’d never felt anything like it. Searched the encyclopedia for the feeling’s name when I got home: “Goosebumps.”

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

I think we make gods who look like us for a reason. I think, in spite of it all, we trust we can be believed in.

I’m only half a second outside the furnace of my rage,

I only call death when I forget how to speak eternity’s language, forget that to run out of time is to run into the truth

My partner and I have had hard days. Hard months. But time stops when you’re in love, so I am the same age as I was when we met five years ago.

Regret is a time machine to the past. Worry is a time machine to the future. Gratitude is a time machine to the present.

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

I’ve been honored to serve as the server at the banquet where I eat myself alive.

I fully intend to replace whatever dreams I shattered when I was beating myself up.

anyone who asks you to hold your tongue is asking you to hold the heaviest thing in the galaxy.

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