Source of book: I own this
This post is a bit late. I started reading this book for Pride Month, but ended up getting delayed in writing about it, both because of vacations, and because I had library books I needed to write about first so I could return them in time.
Andrea Gibson first came to my attention, unfortunately, when they died far too young of cancer. I decided to look up some of their poems, and, liking them, ordered this volume.
More recently, I was reminded of her work by a friend. I am a part of a group that meets about once a month to discuss poetry and stuff - my wife coined the term “Poetry Nerd Church” - which is about right. Anyway, one of our members chose a Gibson poem to discuss, and it sparked my decision to read the entire book.
Gibson was lesbian and non-binary, and a survivor - like me - of toxic authoritarian religion. Many of their poems deal with trauma, including spiritual abuse, and so they felt quite familiar, even though I am a cishet guy.
Gibson’s reputation rested not only on their poetry, but also on their Spoken Word readings. There are some poets who should not read their own poems aloud, just as there are authors who should not read their audiobooks.
But Gibson was amazing in their readings, and I highly recommend checking out the ones that are on the interwebs.
There are a number of poems that stood out to me in this collection, although, as often is the case, I could have selected any number of ones that I omitted.
Many of the poems are longer, so I won’t necessarily be quoting many entire poems, but rather choosing lines and passages that I particularly liked.
I will start with the one that we discussed in our group:
Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps
I wasn’t, by any means, a natural.
Was not one of those wow-hounds
born jaw-dropped. I was tough in the husk.
Went years untouched by rain. Took shelter
seriously, even and often especially
in good weather, my tears like teenagers
hiding under the hoods of my eyes,
so committed they were to never falling
for the joke of astonishment.
When I was told there were seven
wonders of the world, I trusted the math,
believed I had seen none of them.
Of course beauty hunted me.
It hunts everyone. But I outran it, hid
in worry, regret, the promise of an afterlife
or a week’s end.
Then one day, in a red velvet theater
in New Orleans, I watched Maya Angelou
walk on stage. Seventeen slow steps to the mic.
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.”’
Afterwards, 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.
Allen Iverson on the television in his first season
with the Sixers, crossover sharp as a V of sparrows
Flying through the paint like Michelangelo’s brush:
333 goosebumps.
My baby sister, sober for the first time
in thirteen years, calling to tell me she just noticed
our mother’s eyes are green:
505 goosebumps.
One day, my friend scored tickets
to a Prince concert. Tiny venue. I was right
behind the sound booth. Prince’s entire band
that evening—women. At the end of the show
The sound person turned around and whispered,
He didn’t play one song on his setlist the whole night.
I live on stages. I know what it is to scratch a plan,
but not the whole trip and still arrive to your destination
two hundred years before your time:
421 (artist formerly known as)
goosebumps.
But that’s just the fancy stuff.
Some of them came from simple facts—
It rains diamonds on Jupiter.
189 goosebumps.
Blood donors in Sweden receive a thank you
message when their blood is used.
301 Nordic goosebumps.
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
for each and every note plucked
up from the string section of her refusal to silence
her dream. After that, nothing in the world was gray.
Even the movie of my past was released in color.
The oldest man in my hometown could not
get to the door to listen to our carols,
so we went inside and sang at his bedside instead.
Twenty-four boots on the front step
catching snowflakes with their tongues:
776 goosebumps.
At one point everything started doing it:
A sincere apology: 221 goosebumps
An enemy’s love poem: 222 goosebumps.
The moon rising over the continental divide.
My love and I thought it was a car
driving off a cliff, and suddenly nothing
in the world was dying. You ever felt that?
A split second when nothing in the world is dying?
888 goosebumps,
and the next day I sharpened a tiny ax
so I could split the seconds myself.
Too much lives in a moment
to not feed it to the fire in the heart, slow.
A Missoula treehouse filled with candlelight.
143 goosebumps.
The octopus documentary.
54 goosebumps multiplied by 8.
The biggest dog in the shelter
hiding behind a teacup chihuahua,
and the woman who came to adopt a cat
taking all three of them home.
1,012 goosebumps.
There is no escaping the magic now.
Beauty caught me and never let me go.
And the thing about the world record
is—if someone breaks it after me,
and they will break it after me,
I will love that so much
that without even trying,
I’ll break it again.
That’s pretty wild, isn’t it? Definitely worth reading aloud.
For the next poem, “The Year of No Grudges, or Instead of Writing a Furious Text, I Try a Poem,” there are a few lines that were particularly excellent. But read the whole thing, of course.
I know most people try hard
to do good and find out too late
they should have tried softer.
And this:
I’ve never in my whole life
been levelheaded, but the older I get,
I’m more level-hearted --
and 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.
And this:
That’s how mistakes work
if you’re loving the right kind of people.
And you’re the right kind of people.
You’ve walked on water
so many times you know grace
is super, super slippery.
There’s literally nothing
anyone is more likely
to fall from.
Wit certainly abounds in these poems. It can be profound, as in the above excerpts. Or it can be just straight up funny, as in the opening of “Time Piece.”
I’ve never known who Nick is.
I show up just in the stranger of time,
sift every grain of sand from the Pacific Coast
into an hourglass that fits in my palm.
I turn the hourglass upside down and Vancouver
trades places with San Diego. When I ask how
I covered the wildfires in the snow, I say
I had time on my hands.
And this later line from the same (rather long) poem:
Bitterness is the easiest way
to leave this world having had only
a near-life experience.
Okay, that one is definitely more toward the profound end of the spectrum. This one is also good:
Regret is a time machine to the past.
Worry is a time machine to the future.
Gratitude is a time machine to the present.
The next poem is another I will quote in full, in no small part because I have LGBTQ kids, and I very much want them to be alive and thrive. It is also dedicated to my cousin, who died by suicide after he was rejected by his parents. You can hear Gibson read the poem here.
Queer Youth are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide
means:
You lived five times harder than you should have had to
to still have a body when you graduated high school.
means:
Hate worked five times harder
to make your spirit its wishbone.
means:
When your mother asked what was wrong,
you were five times more likely to believe you’d lose
her if you spoke the truth.
means:
You were told five times more often
you’d go to hell when you died.
means:
Burning for eternity seemed five times
more doable than another day in the school lunchroom.
means:
You were five times more inclined
to triple-padlock your diary.
means:
You were five times more likely
to stop writing your story down.
means:
I write my heart out now.
I graffiti billboards with the page of my diary
the bullies used to start the rumors.
I tie that page to the end of a kite string and run
a crooked line through the straightest mile
of the Bible Belt.
That page is a protest sign.
That page is a bandana washing
the tear gas out of my lover’s eyes.
Queer youth are five times more likely to die by suicide.
means:
I sneak into fascist sleepovers
and sharpie my pronouns onto the faces
of senators who voted to criminalize my kisses
when I was nineteen.
I cut the hate out of my mail
and papier-mache Christmas ornaments
for queer couples whose parents
do not want to know their grandchildren.
I hack high school curriculums and delete
every test that does not ask what the P
in Marsha P. Johnson stands for.
I walk through graveyards with a chisel
correcting the names of trans kids
whose families said, No, when asked,
Can you just let me live?
I pace the suburbs with spray paint, editing
the welcome mats of homophobes until they all
speak the truth: that they personally burned
the roof over the heads of queer youth
are five times more likely to die by suicide
means:
There are many days I thirst for my own silence
but walk through the desert screaming instead
because I, like most of my queer friends, don’t have a child
-- I have millions -- from Nebraska to Chechnya,
to the Baptist church where I grew up.
My pride in them is a parade I know
won’t keep all of them alive, but I keep cutting
my diary into confetti to throw at their hopes
when they float by scared or furious
or laughing or in love and desperate
For the headline to say: Queer youth
are five times more likely to:
offer to walk their younger siblings home from school.
To notice the different accents of sparrows.
To find an eyelash and spend twenty minutes
trying to pick what to wish for.
Five times more likely to:
never outgrow blanket forts.
To know there is a word for the scent in the air
after it rains. To see livelines look like telephone wires
and call a friend who’s having a bad day.
Five times more likely to:
adore the last man who walked on the moon
just because he wrote his daughter’s initials there.
To know there is no universe in which they would not
be proud of their own children.
Queer youth are five times more likely to:
see you how you dream of seeing yourself.
To write something in your yearbook that will get you
through the next decade. To spot a stranger crying
and ask if there’s anything they can do to help.
Five times more likely to:
need us to do the same.
I tear up every time I read that poem. I think it is up there with my favorite Langston Hughes Poem, “Let America be America Again,” for its emotional impact and its demand for justice.
There are a few shorter poems in this book. Including this one, which is thoroughly related to the previous one:
No Such Thing as the Innocent Bystander
Silence rides shotgun
wherever hate goes.
A few of the works in this book are also closer to prose than to poetry. For example, the hilarious “To whom it Definitely Concerns,” which begins:
please accept this letter as formal notification that I am resigning from
the position of My Own Worst Enemy.
Another one of those, “What Love Is,” which is about, among other things, coming out, and growing up in the rural south, and contains this gem:
What I was certain of was that they weren’t coming because they knew I’d ended my last show with a poem about how church yard sales are secretly the best places to buy dildos.
Oh man, the stories I could tell. Gibson is spot on with that observation. Attorneys often find out a lot of things about those “sweet little church ladies.” Just saying.
Later in the piece, after a fascinating anecdote about a show they did where a girlfriend’s parents showed up (hence the prior line), and the father, crying, said “I’m seventy-six years old and I just tonight figured out what love is.”
Some of the poetry is about climate activism, including “Homesick: A Plea for our Planet,” wherein they note that back when our generation was kids, you could still be a Republican and believe in science.
but the principal gave me
a gold ribbon and not a single bit of attitude
about my radical political stance
because neither he nor I knew
it was political. Science had not yet been
fully framed as leftist propaganda.
The president did not have a twitter fed
starving the world of facts.
Hence how I, a person who is conservative by temperament, finding myself described as a leftist and even a communist, because I believe in science and facts and reality, not the alternative universe of the Orange Fascist. Which can lead into the next short poem:
Good Grief
Let your
heart break
so your spirit
doesn’t.
The poem, “The Test of Time,” about her mother’s slow disability and loss of function, contains a line I wanted to highlight.
but there is a test we can all take to find out the future.
It’s called the test of time. And what you do is you live
until you die. And you refuse to let the hands of your clock
curl into fists to fight the lessons off. Even if the lessons
are brutally hard.
Another short poem spoke to me. It’s a hard thing to follow some days, I must say.
Wellness Check
In any moment,
on any given day,
I can measure
my wellness
by this question:
Is my attention on loving,
or is my attention on
who isn’t loving me?
I am going to mention one line I take issue with in “My Girlfriend’s Karaoke Song.” In it, the girlfriend sings Jewel’s song “You Were Meant for Me,” which is a good song. But the poem claims that Em is a “very difficult key.” Now, I do agree the song is not a beginner-level song, but it isn’t because of the key, which is actually easy on guitar and in the middle of the typical human vocal range. (And also, Em is a fantastic violin key - ask Mendelssohn…) It’s because of where the melody begins in relation to the key. It’s picking the note out of the air at the beginning. So, a bit of a whine from one kind of artist to another.
Oh well.
Anyway, I want to end with another poem that really spoke to me - and sparked a bit of defensiveness from some religious friends. Obviously, the poem isn’t meant to be systemic theology, but a response to the all-too-common way the afterlife is used as a means of abuse toward those who don’t kow-tow to the gatekeepers of theology.
What Sucks About the Afterlife
On Earth, everyone loved butterflies,
but I trusted the caterpillars more.
I trusted the ones who knew
they were not done growing.
On Earth, I was a work in progress,
was comforted in the knowing
that I had a million mistakes still in me
to learn from. I changed my mind
more often than I changed my socks,
and whenever I was criticized
for mismatched thoughts, I’d say,
Who wants to be today
who they were yesterday?
Becoming was how I prayed.
But here - I am past the finish line:
I have a heart of gold,
and I never have to dig for it.
I couldn’t do anything wrong if I tried,
and trust me, I try, but
I get hot-headed, and my rage
toasts the marshmallow on an angel’s
celestial s’mores. I lose my temper and find it
in the halo lost-and-found box.
Lies won’t let me tell them,
They handed me a sticker
that said My Name Is and I wrote
Everyone by accident. I can’t remember
what selfishness is. Yesterday I said
something angry about an ex, and a quarter
of my tastebuds jumped off my tongue.
I’ve known nothing
of bitterness since.
Right before I died, I thought
In the afterlife, I’ll apply for a job
at a mistake factory. They’ll be awed
by my resume. If anything, I’m over qualified.
But there’s no place where they make
mistakes here. Everyone is flawless,
Everyone’s blunders are photoshopped
right off their lives before
they even happen. Is this heaven
or hell? I can’t tell. I looked
that famous carpenter up
in the phone book, but his number
wasn’t listed, and I need to ask him
where to find the wood to build
some missteps. I’m not about to spend
eternity burning in the lie that holy
and perfect are the same thing.
Do you understand?
A promised land
is not a promised land
if I can’t keep learning.
Dare I say “Amen”? In an interview, Gibson elaborated a bit about “how much of this world would change for the better if we were collectively more interested in growing and learning than we were in our own rightness. Attachment to rightness instantly shuts down vital conversations. I imagine a world where folks are thrilled about the possibility of having their minds and hearts changed every single day, and that world is so beautiful.”
I very much enjoyed this collection, and will be adding additional Andrea Gibson collections to my library.
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