Andrea Gibson

My body is a mason jar
transparent as a jellyfish
I wish for a heart you can see straight through
for a voice that glows in the dark
and a few really good friends to skip moon rocks to.

From Jellyfish, by Andrea Gibson.

A few weeks ago, Andrea Gibson passed away. Their work touched the lives of many, many people. Today, I want to dedicate a few words to how their work touched my life in particular. It feels denigrating somehow to talk about someone’s art as only their work, when true art demands we place our humanity on display. And so I suppose this is less a discussion of how Andrea Gibson’s work has affected me, but rather how the aspects of their life they chose to share with the world have affected me. And boy howdy, have they affected me profoundly. In strange, surprising, beautiful and delightful ways.

The first Andrea Gibson poem I ever heard was Jellyfish, on 20th September 2012. The second was I Do, later that night. I was 18. I was about to go to university. I was wide-eyed, full of joy, and utterly, perhaps blissfully unaware of what was coming my way. Both of these poems showed me a transformative way to love. To love recklessly and generously, loudly and proudly. But not to love naïvely. To love with one’s eyes as open as one’s heart. It is in that spirit that I write this tribute.

It’s tempting in many ways to look back at the summer of 2012 as a peak, a local maximum between the general ordeal of being a teenager, and the abject isolation of 2013–17. Tempting, I think, but harmful. Andrea Gibson’s poetry helped me see some of the deepest challenges in my life as parts of a story. They did perhaps more than anyone outside of my immediate friends and family to help me integrate the more upsetting experiences of my life into one cohesive Max. These lessons happened over years, in countless poems. Below, I am going to share a few that left particular impacts.

In Rush Hour, Gibson taught me how better to hold an open heart in a closed and callous world; how to have hope when anything we feel we can do is rendered meaningless in the face of such overwhelming cruelty:

In the city where I live
They’ve officially labeled panhandling on medians a crime
because no one wants to drive by and see that shit

…

I remember being five years old
Watching a feather fall from the sky
and praying all day that the bird that lost it could still fly

…

So last night I freed a kite to the wind in hopes of it finding Palestine.
It won’t.
But I’m trying to remember who I used to be.

…

Tomorrow 600,000 feathers are going to fall from the sky.
There’s no way we’re going to catch them all but somebody tell me
We are at least going to try.

In The Nutritionist, Gibson taught me that to suffer is not to be alone; that there are safe spaces in which to share our pain, even in a world that demands of us our best presentation; that it is incumbent upon all of us to build those safe spaces for each other; that we do not necessarily need to be fixed:

So let me tell you I know there are days
it looks like the whole world is dancing in the streets
when you break down like the doors of the looted buildings
You are not alone and wondering who will be convicted
of the crime of insisting you keep loading your grief
into the chamber of your shame
You are not weak just because your heart feels so heavy

if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,

my god that’s plenty

my god that’s enough
my god that is so so much for the light to give
each of us at each other’s backs whispering over and over and over

“Live”
“Live”
“Live”

To be taught that we do not necessarily need to be fixed has been something I’ve had to have reinforced time and time again, while having the good fortune to be able to bask in the love of my friends, and my family. I wish it was not such a powerful thing to preach. I wish Andra Gibson had not been so radical. I wish their love was uncontroversial, and regular. But that isn’t our world, yet. If my words have introduced Andrea Gibson to anyone, I hope that their words in turn can teach you something about a radical, hopeful, uncompromising kind of love.

On the day that I met my partner for the first time, she cited an Andrea Gibson poem to me. One of those weird things that makes you feel connected to someone, I guess. The magic of both of us finding that connection in that moment is something that still brings a tear to my eye. The poem Laura had been thinking about was Tincture:

Imagine, when a human dies,
the soul misses the body,
actually grieves the loss of its hands and all they could hold.
Misses the throat closing shy reading out loud on the first day of school.
Imagine the soul misses the stubbed toe, the loose tooth, the funny bone.

…

Nothing in space can imagine it.
No comet, no nebula, no ray of light can fathom the landscape of awe,
the heat of shame.
The fingertips pulling the first gray hair and throwing it away.

I can’t imagine it, the stars say.
Tell us again about goosebumps.
Tell us again about pain.

Andrea Gibson’s poetry has helped me learn how to live, and how to love, and how to grieve. Most of all, I’ve learned how to experience with patience and reverence. They transformed their life, with all their love and pain and sickness and grief, and more love into a gift. Something for all of us.