Poet’s Corner: “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.” by Andrea Gibson

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.” Copyright © 2023 by Andrea Gibson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 30, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

Andrea Gibson, courtesy of the Boulder Library Foundation

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it. 

I’ve loved Andrea Gibson’s work for years, and was heartbroken when they passed away not long ago. I’ll always recommend spending time with my favourite poem of theirs, “What Love Is.” But today, honouring the ways the world is raising awareness about cancer throughout April and May, we’re looking at “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.” 

The first thing you might notice is the length of the title: It’s two sentences, which we don’t see often. But this craft choice sets up the dialogue, structure, and voice of the poem. The title’s language doesn’t appear as succinct or compressed as the poem’s, and through its length and likeness to prose, it tells us how to read the poem: As something brave, as a risk. The content/subject is the act of bravery, but formally it’s supported by writing that begins as two prose-like sentences and takes the risk of becoming a poem instead, like the expansiveness of life transitioning into the (seeming) narrowness of death. 

In the poem, we encounter couplets and many pairs of images—gloves, life and death, etc. The couplet form seems to say 1) ‘this,’ 2) pause for a breath on the hinge of the line break, and then 3) ‘that.’ It’s almost as if the first line is a breath in and the second is a breath out. 

Similarly, there’s an ebb and flow of thinking one thing, and then another—fear followed by belief. The enjambed lines, often across stanza breaks, amplify this stunningly:

“I could survive forever // on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me /  to stop measuring my lifespan by length, // but by width?”

Further, the brilliance of this poem is that it reads as if Andrea wrote it down in a notebook (likely they did). But the precision of the diction, syntax, and images is carefully crafted. The woods challenge our notions and metaphors for death and darkness, for example. 

And then, time moves with Andrea’s thoughtful, patient touch.

The spaces between God, basketball, and balloons are presumably only a few seconds of thought, but the seconds of reading time slow and swell, mirroring the expansiveness of a balloon, a court, and God. The careful placing of images and metaphor enact this feeling. We move between time periods and time ‘owed,’ to literal outer space (from the balloon to the sky to the moon). And then we’re brought gently back to Earth, where death has been happening rather than coming. So often we think of the afterlife as “up there.” We look to the sky when we think of someone who’s no longer with us. But our bodies are “down there.” Down here, really. To remember—and be remembered—is to remain with the Earth. And as Andrea remembers their loved ones, we remember them, too. 

Poet’s Corner: “Rosa Parks” by Nikki Giovanni

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“Rosa Parks” by Nikki Giovanni from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. Copyright © 2002 by Nikki Giovanni. Reprinted in Poetry by permission of Harper Collins Publishers Inc.

A white sign with black capital letters, held up at a protest.

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.

In 1971, Nikki Giovanni spoke with James Baldwin at length in A Dialogue (also released as a book). When I first read it, not long after she passed away in December 2024, the texture and resonance of her voice felt like double-sided sticky tape. It hasn’t left me, and sticks to what I read now. Her conviction is unparalleled not only in its power but in its grace; grace as in its dexterity of love. And for that reason alone, I struggled to choose just one poem for this essay. Nikki still calls us with wit, fervour, and care. 

“Rosa Parks” stands out in its dense, uniform block of text. It conforms, you might say, to the shape of a column in a newspaper, complete with narrative flow. But it certainly doesn’t conform in its content, which isn’t beneath complex diction or syntax, but under the literal act of reading the poem. So few of us read poems by Black women. It’s a great month to start. They’ve been writing the truth—of love and violence—for centuries, under persecution and censorship, sowing wisdom the way enslaved Black women, aboard ships crossing the Atlantic, hid seeds in their hair.

Nikki’s poem is also the shape of an elegy, ode, or brick—to be thrown or built with. It’s the shape of heaviness. The ghosts of Thurgood Marshall, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emmett Till, and the Pullman Porters are with us. And they remain alive, in part because women like Rosa Parks (and Claudette Colvin, Viola White, Pauli Murray, and Elizabeth Jennings Graham) sat back down on a bus, and kept what was always theirs. It wasn’t her feet that were tired when Rosa, the field secretary of the NAACP, reclaimed that seat—on the bus and elsewhere. It was hers, and everyone’s before her. Nikki’s poem reminds us of a few things: Rest is a human right, and yes, Black women are strong in innumerable ways, one of which is when they choose rest as resistance.  

“Rosa Parks” further connects modes of transportation through time, non-linearly, resisting the linear flow of news that frequently refuses the past’s life in the present. “And this is / for all the people who said Never Again” remains a call to action. It feels eerily applicable, and even at the time the poem was written (2002), could be a reference to wars on Palestine and Afghanistan, still raging today.

And in our role, as readers and distributors of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry, we can look to the Pullman Porters she writes of. 

“The Pullman Company established its sleeper cars as a unique and luxurious way to travel, complete with the [carefully trained, typically formerly enslaved Black men], hired to be porters. Pullman Porters quickly became a staple of the Pullman Sleeping Car experience, often fighting to maintain a balance between good relations with the Pullman company and protesting for better conditions and wages. Pullman Porters are often attributed to helping create a [B]lack middle class in the United States, with their employees forming the first all-[B]lack union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925.”

—Library of Congress

The Pullman Porters were the keepers of care and right to protest for their Black passengers. With this in mind, I admire the beckoning of a new manifesto, of sorts, with capitalization of ‘No’ in Nikki’s poem:

“No longer would / there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs. / Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system, / the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and / the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young / men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No.”

“Rosa Parks” is an example of poetry as resistance, and therefore, as a commitment to storytelling in ongoing violence and its ever-unfolding aftermath. It’s a vow to truth-telling. And with that, because no one will ever say it better:

“But it was the / Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it / was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not / being able to stand it. She sat back down.”

Poet’s Corner: “The Same City” by Terrance Hayes

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor

“The Same City” by Terrance Hayes from Hip Logic. Copyright © by Terrance Hayes. Reprinted in Poetry with permission of Penguin Books, a division of The Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

A car in the rain at night

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.

Terrance Hayes is one of my favourite poets, with a long list of collections, awards, and fellowships which you can explore here. He is known to invent formal constraints and often writes on themes of music, masculinity, popular culture, and race. His breathtaking poem, “The Same City,” is no different. 

The first thing you might notice about it is the shape of the poem, much like falling snow or a rain-streaked windshield—especially in the cold. The lineation could also mimic tassels or something woven, drawing attention to the layering of time and relationships in the poem. We feel the movement, which Hayes mentions in this quote, via Poetry, originally from a 2013 interview with Lauren Russell for Hot Metal Bridge:

“I’m chasing a kind of language that can be unburdened by people’s expectations. I think music is the primary model—how close can you get this language to be like music and communicate feeling at the base level in the same way a composition with no words communicates meaning? It might be impossible. Language is always burdened by thought. I’m just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.”

The movement of water, juice, breath, cables, mouths, electricity, radiowaves, bodies, traffic, and light are musical to begin with, but Hayes illuminates this by braiding time in: the present moment’s, Noah’s, Joseph’s, his when he met his girlfriend, his father’s as a younger man, and the infant’s biological father’s. And all of this life shares space to say that he—we—exist within all of these times. A stunning example is in the first half of the poem, where we almost feel like the speaker could be the infant’s brother—that he’s longing to be a father through this lens: “I’d get out now, / prove I can stand with him / in the cold, but he told me to stay / with the infant.” 

And then, we burrow further into the soil of time by visiting Noah and Joseph, setting up the multi-generational rescuing that happens in the second stanza—“But to rescue a soul is as close / as anyone comes to God”—by beginning again. This is especially resonant of Noah’s story, after the flood. In the case of this poem, the rain is still falling, and the rescue is ongoing with tendrils in every time portal Hayes has opened (and left open). In other words, he’s writing about love. 

The complexity of love is further enacted through the breathtaking enjambment Hayes uses. These lines stop me every time: “There is one thing I will remember / all my life. It is as small / & holy as the mouth / of an infant. It is speechless.” Read each line individually, without the others. Hayes doesn’t tell us what the ‘one thing’ is, either. I read it as ‘love’ while knowing how intentionally he leaves himself and us speechless. It’s so profound it’s unnamable. And all we can do is hold each other—our smallness, sacredness, and innocence—in the cold.

Thinking about the holiday season and the onset of winter, this poem is a tender though strong reminder to remember who we are because of who is or has been for us. “In 1974, this man met my mother / for the first time as I cried or slept / in the same city that holds us / tonight. If you ever tell my story, / say that’s the year I was born.” Look at the enjambment again, and how it’s shifted to capture a clear love, honouring, and admiration for a father, even though I’m positive it wasn’t a perfect relationship. The holidays remind us that perfect relationships don’t exist. We continue to love, give, and carry grief regardless. Whose name(s), in your life, could you substitute into this poem, perhaps changing a few details here and there? We are all born when someone else is, whether blood-related or not. And to tell them we feel this is one of the greatest gifts we can give during the loneliest time of the year. 

Before you go, I wanted to share a few other poems that are in conversation with this one: “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo, “A New Law” by Greg Delanty, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. Please read them—I hope they offer you a hand or a hug this winter.