Nicky Beer

Little Faith Poem

Remember the morning spent reading by

the low dense jasmine        how the high ocean

breezes seemed to blow your senses deep

into its hive of fragrant stars                the sky

an uninjured blue        the conversations

of women rising and settling and rising

in friendly flocks throughout the café’s courtyard        

the sun lolling across your back         and trouble

still a breath away                 but perhaps persuaded

to pause for a minute in its slow rest-

less stalking of our bodies                our laughably

tender bodies that we insist on pushing

through the wide avenues of this grievous earth

Nicky Beer is a bi/queer writer, and the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes (Milkweed, 2022). Her first two books, The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) and The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015), were both winners of the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. She has received honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Poetry Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is as a poetry editor for Copper Nickel.