You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

Afterward, I thought—I can do this. Started training morning to night, crowbar swinging like a pendulum at the wall of my chest. Tore the caution tape off my life and let everything touch it:

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

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.

So sometimes you look like a human scribble, like a two-year-old has colored you in, like you have too many feelings to stay inside the lines of your own skin.

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.

Dawn presses her blushing face to my window, asks me if I know the records in my record collection look like the insides of trees. Yes, I say, there is nothing you have ever grown that isn’t music. You are the bamboo in Coltrane’s saxophone reed. The mulberries that fed the silkworms that made the slippers for the ballet. The pine that built the loom that wove the hemp for Frida Kahlo’s canvas. The roses that dyed her paint hoping her brush could bleed for her body. Who, more than the earth, has bled for us?

Is the volcano that pours the mercury into the thermometers held under our tongues. The earth takes our temperature, tells us when we are too hot, even after we’ve spent decades denying her fever. Our hands held to her burning forehead, we insist she is fine while wildfires turn redwoods to toothpicks,