Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz Quotes

Andrea Gibson is a truly American poet, or rather, she represents the America I want to live in. Her work lights a candle to lead us where we need to go.

This poem is the poem I'm writing because
we aren't speaking, and it is making my heart hurt
so bad that sometimes I can't make it up off the floor.

You,
quiet and alone in your kitchen, cigaretteless.
Me, left tapping on your rain-streaked window,

wanting you to know that everything is going
to get better, and really hoping that it does.

You know, they say that there is a part
of the human chest that it you strike it hard enough,
it makes the person's heart explode. This sounds like
such a lie that I have to believe it's the truth. If I were
science, I'd never tell anyone where this place is.
If I were science, I'd have named this place after you.

I'm sorry I could never see myself out
of the twitching fever of my heartache,
that I traded everything we had for
something that never ended up being.
But if I could take anything back, it wouldn't be
the glittering hope I stuck in the amber of your eyes,
or the sweet eager of our conversations.
No, it would be that last stony path to nothing,
when we both gave up without telling the other.
How silence arrived like a returned valentine
on that morning
we finally taught our phones not to ring.

Let's feed out tears to the dragons of misery, but let's never crawl in their mouths.

Let me advise you to commence at once observing for yourself.
Don't trust what you are told in lectures, or read in books, but make the knowledge your own, by your own labors.
Lectures and books will serve as guides and beacons, but the goals can only be reached by travelling the road yourself.

One day we wake up and we are broken. We taste it
in our morning kiss. Our mirror tells us the same stories
in separate hours: things will never be the same.