“Goodbye, Hello” by Heather June Gibbons Posted in: Poems – Tags: Heather June Gibbons
Goodbye, Hello
By Heather June Gibbons
Selected by Donna Stonecipher
Goodbye, interstate drivers and smoked pork chops,
goodbye straightening irons, hello neon
short-shorts, panhandlers and fanny packs
goodbye, large man in hunter’s camo hunched over a scooter
idling at a red light, goodbye, patient waking up
with a white film on her tongue, goodbye, Sunday morning
Solo cups dotting the frat house lawn, goodbye, supercollider
goodbye Big Ten football and fabric store ladies
goodbye, front porch and steamy garden of zucchini
goodbye suburb of a small Midwestern city, abandoned
mall with just a Sears left, goodbye, cast-off
flip-flop in the humidity, horse racing and belly fat
hello fast-track and venture capitalist, juicing and avocado toast
hello fog baby, hello whiskey sour, goodbye sandpaper
goodbye buzzing streetlamp and dead cricket crunch
hello, rain face, goodbye ashtray, hello children
holding knots on a rope led by man in rainbow suspenders
hello dreadlocks and reading Proust on the subway
hello pretty yoga teacher with BO extolling the holiness of nostrils
goodbye lindy hop, hello roller disco, goodbye lost watch
hello shiny scar, microclimates, pop-ups, SSRI inhibitors
hello shimmering, hello hand, goodbye wedding band
goodbye, mortgage, hello rent and sand dunes
and fancy Hungarian psychoanalyst, may I lie down awhile
on this midcentury modern divan, hello, desperate
phone calls across time zones while walking briskly
by mechanical waterfalls and morning Tai Chi-ers
hello tourists, yes, I can show you which way
to the botanical garden and the bridge
goodbye, cicadas, I miss your bent whir, goodbye
endless flatness I do not miss at all, goodbye leaky roof
and passive-aggressive historic neighborhood association
goodbye, aerial patchwork of soybean fields
hello, the possibility of surfing, goodbye, seasons
goodbye friends with children in Pittsburg, hello
sailboats and traffic and tech bros, goodbye
perfectly falling down barns, silos and railway depots
hello arthritis, hello personality test, hello Mom
with your new white hair, I remember you
when you were younger than I am now
before I was stuck in this glitch of accretion
a kind of opening—hello, embryo—
a kind of letting go.
Heather June Gibbons is the author of Her Mouth as Souvenir, winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize (University of Utah Press), and two chapbooks. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Vermont Studio Center. She lives in San Francisco. You can find more of her work here: https://www.heatherjunegibbons.com