from the barrens
t love smith on Andrea Gibson
andrea gibson is raking blueberries
in the path next to mine, and i’m tryin’
not to let them know i know them
but my grandparents kept the tv on
full blast every girls’ tournament week,
we’d cheer for the same girls even when
they go to college on scholarships
like rachel bouchard from farmingdale
who answered all of my fan mail at umo
and carried me to medical when i broke
my tailbone trying to push a layup
past the tower of elise spaulding,
whose mom paid for me to go
to basketball camp at the field
house, the summer of 1992, then
when no one was around,
the pvhs varsity coach said,
you will never play on my team,
you arrogant little dyke.
2. andrea gibson is halfway down
their lane with twice as many boxes
and i have given up the race
knowing i was never any competition.
as i daydream in the blueberry lane,
i remember practicing on the hill
at the burlington elementary school,
where the metal hoop swung
to one side and screwed the swoosh.
i imagine a game of h. o. r. s. e
and know that there’s no shot
i could take that andrea couldn’t make.
there’s no way to win but that’s not the point.
it’s just a daydream about two queer af tomboys
shooting hoops and if we teamed up,
there wasn’t any boy in 1992
who could have beat us.
3. andrea gibson has finished two lanes
and i’m sitting shoveling blueberries
from my blistered palms by the fist-full
into my blue mouth with an older boy,
chad, that was his ssstupid name,
from two rows over, taunting,
what’d you do, blow a smurf,
a month before he committed a felony
on a pile of hay in bub’s uncle’s ol’ horse barn.
there aren’t enough poems—never enough
paper to clot the wounds,
so the hemorrhage never heals
when the body grips for life—
we’re left to bleed and bleed the blue-
berry field ’til it’s drenched in red,
like some stephen king story—
we were haunted by our own ghosts
and the ghosts of those who died
so we could live.
t love smith (they/them) is a queer, trans/non-binary poet stewarding unceded Wabanaki land. they are a Stonecoast MFA Candidate and Assistant Development Director at WMPG and is the founder and Development Curator of Trans Poetics Archive. The archive published Maine’s First Transgender Poetry Anthology, Monster Beauties in May 2025. t’s poetry has been published in new words press, Island Ink and presented on local radio shows and podcasts.
