Betsy

“When they ask why we stayed together for so long I say, I don’t know. I just know that we cried at the exact same time in every movie. I know we blushed everyday for the first two years. I know I always stole the covers and she never woke me up. I know the exact look on her face, the first night she used my toothbrush. The next day, I brushed my teeth like thirtysome times, ‘cause I didn’t want to let her go. You have to understand when it hurt to love her, it hurt the way the light hurts your eyes in the middle of the night, but I had to see, even through the ruin, if what we were burying were seeds. There were so many plants in our house, you could rake the leaves even through that winter when I was trying to make angels in the snow of her cold shoulder. She was still leaving love notes in my suitcase; I’d always find them.”
― Andrea Gibson

“Lately I've been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and how I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be. And when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: before I die, I want to be somebody's favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.”
― Andrea Gibson

“I wrote too many poems in a language I did not yet know how to speak
But I know now it doesn't matter how well I say grace
if I am sitting at a table where I am offering no bread to eat
So this is my wheat field
you can have every acre, Love
this is my garden song
this is my fist fight
with that bitter frost
tonight I begged another stage light to become that back alley street lamp that we danced beneath
the night your warm mouth fell on my timid cheek
as i sang maybe i need you
off key
but in tune
maybe i need you the way that big moon needs that open sea
maybe i didn't even know i was here til i saw you holding me
give me one room to come home to
give me the palm of your hand
every strand of my hair is a kite string
and I have been blue in the face with your sky
crying a flood over Iowa so you mother will wake to Venice
Lover, I smashed my glass slipper to build a stained glass window for every wall inside my chest
now my heart is a pressed flower and a tattered bible
it is the one verse you can trust
so I'm putting all of my words in the collection plate
I am setting the table with bread and grace
my knees are bent
like the corner of a page
I am saving your place”
― Andrea Gibson

“A doctor once told me I feel too much. I said, so does god. that’s why you can see the grand canyon from the moon.”
― Andrea Gibson