Showing posts with label Andrea Gibson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrea Gibson. Show all posts

10/5/18

1988 - Andrea Gibson

It was the year your mother
put her cigarette out on your arm.
The year you forgave her so hard
you stopped crying for good.

I was on the other side of the world
watching my father shine his knives.
I was trying to get the nerve to tell him
who to kill.

But he never figured out
there was someone to kill.
Collected knives like art
and hung them on our walls.

That autumn I made a person
by stuffing a pile of dead leaves
into an old pair of clothes.
Maybe you did too. Maybe

you found a pumpkin for a head
and dug it hollow with your hands.

Friend, if memories had been seeds
we could have chosen not to plant
do you think we would have ever found each other?

Do you believe in the magnet of scars? I believe

people who have been through hell
will build their love from the still burning coals.

Our friendship is a well-heated home
where we always agree on what is art

and what is something to sharpen
and hold in our ready hands.

9/29/17

FOR THE LEAVING - Andrea Gibson


Nobody
ever thinks
about the weight
of a comet, how heavy
something has to be to go
that fast.

8/10/17

LENS - Andrea Gibson


I’ve been practicing gratitude.
I’ve been skipping entire weeks.
Practicing a wider lens. Listening
for the bully’s heartbeat
Hearing it in my own chest.

I’ve been remembering the time I cried
in a cloud of tear gas at a peaceful protest.
How I decided I was too soft to last,
and then I decided to be softer.

I’ve been remembering way way back
to the moment they told me Jesus walked on water.
How I knew whatever I’d grow up to believe

I would never try to wrestle a miracle
away from anyone’s reason to live.
I’ve been remembering how I wrestled a miracle
away from your reason to live.

If only shame could wash me clean,
but that is never how healing works.
Nobody ever won anything from anyone
thinking the whole world was out of their league.
I’m sorry you know

what I look like when no one is looking.
I don’t expect anyone to believe
in justice and forgiveness at the same time.

If it’s any consolation
I feel like a ferris wheel in a snowbank
twenty years after they shut down the park.

If it’s any consolation I’ve been living in my head
whenever anyone tells me I have a good heart.
And I think about you. I think about you. 

4/30/17

PARTY - Andrea Gibson

I was 13 the first time
I drank so much the bugs stopped.

A high school party
at Chrissy Olden’s house,
a senior, whose mom worked overnights
at the truck stop and embarrassed the customers
by not being embarrassed to lose
a solid 10 minutes
rambling over the register
about who wrote what in her yearbook
in 1971.

I was sitting in the middle
of the living room
on a corduroy couch
telling Katie Mathews,
the only other 8th grader there,
something about the temperature of music.

Somewhere there was a DJ
holding his finger under the faucet
of the party.

Every few minutes
I’d be handed a bottle of something
that razored my tonsils all the way down.
If someone had told me
it was nail polish remover
I would have believed them
but I would not have stopped drinking
the red off of my heart.

Do you remember
the first time you knew you
were absolutely safe?

I stumbled into the bathroom
and locked the door behind me
so I could smile as wide as I had to
without anybody knowing I had to.

The mirror was caked with Aqua Net.
There was enough hair in the sink
to mistake the drain for a pet.

The last person who had vomited
in the toilet had missed the toilet.

A year prior, just before my grandfather
swallowed the worm of his life,
he leaned his yellow face into my terrified eyes
and made me promise to Never
go near the bottle.

Nobody had to tell me
that booze was a terrible way to die.

But this was a party,
and I was person for the very first time.

You won’t know what I mean
unless you’ve been there too.
The bugs drowned till morning.

Say what you want about addiction.
I pulled the hair out of the drain with my hands.

I took it home.
I gave it a name.