they say love is healing, but oh
you know how it hurts

to keep this being soft
when the world insists
on its vast horrors
unrelenting
and the love can’t stop
anything

i wish i could say it gets better
it has only gotten worse
i watched a graduation speech
and burst into tears

i am desperate
for the hope
i felt in your time

yesterday, the UN said fourteen
thousand babies would
starve to death
in the next 48 hours

tonight, the world is ending
fourteen thousand times
and i am in bed
sobbing and writing
because last year
i gave everything

i want to write like i did back then
all fast and fire and action

but i see a white woman
at a podium again
recognize our frustration
as though it were a florist to thank
not our desperate proof of humanity

and we are dying a slow, painful,
humiliating death

i have been a ghost for 10 months
and what line can a spectre hold?

you will survive
you will go crazy
you will survive that too
you will fall in love, and then out
you will experience a dozen routine tragedies
and witness a dozen horrific ones
and you will survive it all

and in a year you will think
oh, everything my body gave
as if it could ever be enough

because your clenching, stuttering
heart must still, a year later
dedicate its bruises to tiny body bags
and beloved reporters
younger than you
assassinated

and you will think
how easy it would be to stop feeling
but love is too fucking stubborn
and love is too pretty a word
for a feeling this nauseous and
reeling and screaming
that rips lives up
leaving throats raw
friendships shattered
people traumatized

and still
continues

anaum (they/she) is a genderqueer femme lesbian whose work centers queerness, survivorship, colonialism, and resistance. They are a settler on Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Mississauga lands, from lands colonially named India and Pakistan. Their work is published or forthcoming in the Hart House Review, BrainScramble Magazine, and League of Canadian Poets’ Poetry Pause. She can be found in Tkaronto playing with their niece/nephew pets, or on Instagram at titus.christ.has.risen. Link Tree