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.