For beausia’s poem prompts for National Poetry Writing Month 2024. Prompt 1: still love. Written 4.3.24, completed June 2025 for V’s birthday. Crossposted to IG.

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still my love, the birds are singing
at night when I go to bed, sometimes
even in the afternoon sun, when I
blearily open my eyes, light sneaking past the
blackout curtains, the way plants will find
the light anyway they can, the way you and I
are reaching for joy no matter the way the
world breaks.

still, my love, we log online and read the headlines,
the New York Times long unreliable, publishing
things even the Onion couldn’t make funny;
a Canva collage informs me on Facebook that my
mentor-peer-homie-comrade has passed away.
I call out sick, my body insisting we cannot go
on and work and labor and grind beneath the
cis hetero capitalist white supremacist death machine,
not today, at least.

still, my love, I find ways to keep going
on Tuesdays I wake up to listen to Worlds Beyond Number,
on Wednesday Vibe Check, at the end of the work day, I have
Fantasy High Junior Year. I am clinging as best I can,
to what reminds me of joy in year 5 of our collective pandemic.
you know I am a sun lover, ink drinker, but these years I turn
the page to other things like: more podcasts, more TV, more music;
more ways to be in my body
shake it off, bake it off, downward dog my way into this stillness where
I can try my best to be a clear channel for what is next to come.

my love, if I can settle into my flesh, let my spirit
inhabit this body like a mecha, I think I can do magic –
just another word for dreaming, for storytelling,
and conjuring beauty in difference. even now,
especially now, I might not be a child anymore
but I believe there is something we can
still
do
now.