What the Quiet Witnesses Remember

On not writing about Andrea Gibson

When I heard that Andrea Gibson died this week, I didn’t want to write anything. I thought, “This isn’t mine.”

I met them once, briefly, when I was living in Boulder, CO. I think I was in talks with Megan Falley, their wife, about co-hosting a writing workshop in the event space I was managing at the time. I remember both of them being wildly intelligent and full of something I can only describe as vibrational presence, sharp and kind and magnetic in that way some poets are, like they’re listening to something none of us can quite hear yet.

I first encountered their work over a decade ago in college, when Derrick Brown, Anis Mojgani, and Buddy Wakefield came through Tacoma, WA on the Elephant Engine High Dive Revival tour. They performed in an old church, and I remember sitting in that pew like my body was on fire, in that college-kid way where you don’t know if something is changing your life or just reminding you that you have one. That night cracked something open. I have part of “Cotton in the Air” tattooed on my shoulder because of it. I went down Brown’s Write Bloody publishing rabbit hole and found treasure and Andrea.

Later, living in Boulder, I’d go to open mics on the Hill. Spoken word nights. Blues night sets at the No Name bar that felt like sexy confessions. I wasn’t brave enough to call myself a writer yet, but I was trying. And I was watching people like Andrea, queer, thoughtful, lyrical, sharp, and unflinching, show up on stage and bleed truth. Not metaphorical pain-dressed-as-style, but real, guttural truth. Advocacy and vulnerability and spit and art.

I keep thinking about the small rituals we build around our humanity, about expressing our truest selves. I was just starting to unravel myself publicly back then, just learning the shape of my own voice. Andrea didn’t teach me how to do that. But they absolutely showed me it could be done. They stood up in front of strangers and handed over whole, bleeding, breathing pieces of themselves. That mattered. That mattered more than I recognized at the time.

They weren’t just a poet. They were a queer lighthouse. They were a reminder that survival could be holy, artful, sweaty, and nonlinear. That being outspoken about your love, your body, and your deep emotion, especially when the world tells you to be quiet, is a form of protest and art.

Andrea once wrote, “In the end, I want my heart to be covered in stretch marks.”

Rest easy, Andrea.

xoxo,

Sofia