Dear Poets,
We are enough broken shards of a heart
To give pieces of our self to a room full of strangers.

We are sell-out poetry halls and protests;
Last pages of the stashed notebooks
and lines of poetry found missing in the trash via ****, racism, misogyny,
transphobia, mental illness
and bruising everyday beauty with stillness.

We are part confessions,
Part of ballroom whispers rehearsing the lines of our broken homes behind the two closed doors of our cozy streets.

Amidst hopes and tear streams,
We are found muffling our own screams.

We talk to the mirror as if we want it to respond.
We hold tight to ourselves,
We do not want to be lost.

We are blasting furnaces of anger
and castles of calming ice;
Ripping our chest open and screaming,
"I'm hurt,
I'm breaking,
But I'm breathing.
And this is where I am beautiful,
And this is where I will breathe."

Dear Poets,
We behold our existence into the dark of the day
And bright of the night.

We do what we do
Because we know it's not wrong,
It's right.