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.