Sarah

“When your heart is broken, you plant seeds in the cracks and pray for rain.”
― Andrea Gibson

“The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.

The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”

The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.

The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.

The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”

The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.

The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”

But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”

My bones said, “Write the poems.”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

“They're telling you to blend in,
like you've never seen how a blender works,
like they think you've never seen the mess from the blade.”
― Andrea Gibson

“I want to marry his smile, and if his smile is already married to someone else, then I want to marry his eyebrows and eyes. They're remarkable. Nobody's ever made better use of his or her eyes or eyebrows as a rapper than Kurtis Blow.”
― Shea Serrano, The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979, Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed