You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry)

by Andrea Gibson

and suddenly nothing in the world was dying. You ever felt that? A split second when nothing in the world is dying?

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

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.

Being right is boring. It comforts only the tiniest parts of us, and when it comes to hearts, I want to always be a size queen ’cause that’s how I found you— lifting the spirits of everyone around like a hot air balloon just from the way you burned to be a better person today than you were the day before.

Burning to be better is my favorite quality on anyone, and you are on fire

I couldn’t figure out how to hold something and set it free at the same time. So I dropped the ball. Convinced myself I was up in the air about you when really I was up in the air about me.

It’s what we do—turn our bodies into museums of what was broken.

My grandfather was a clock who stopped before I met him. I’ve heard he was so kind you could look into his face and know you’d never been late for anything. My mother is still a little girl riding on his shoulders. Time flies and she reaches up to pluck feather pens from its wings so I can write this life down. I try. But it doesn’t stay down. It keeps flying so fast I count my wrinkles the way I used to count sheep. When the number gets high enough, I’m told I’ll fall asleep forever, but: I once watched a woman skip her gravestone across a lake like a smooth pebble. Death hops if you let go at the right time.

to run out of time is to run into the truth that none of us have ever been our bodies. If we were—how would we fit in each other’s hearts?

To make up for lost time, you need only to put down the grudge you are holding so you can pick up the phone and say, How many days did we need each other at the same time without knowing it?

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

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

Trauma was not being able to get the hands of the clock off me. Healing was learning no one has ever laid a fingerprint on the part of me that’s infinite.

the light-years it takes to get from one side of a dinner table to another