We Have Always Been Here

By Sam Harty

Don’t wave your sanitized rainbow at me. 

I am a child of the ’80s. 

I remember our brothers — 

dying in hospital beds alone, 

partners kept out in waiting rooms 

like strangers, 

like criminals. 

I remember so many funerals, 

no family other than patrons 

from the local bar. 

The front-row pews, motherless; 

fathers who claimed they 'never had a son.'

We learned to mourn ourselves 

before we even learned to drive. 

Now you tell us to quiet down, 

to be polite, 

to go back in the closet 

we spent decades clawing 

our way out of. 

You legislate our pronouns, 

you police our bathrooms, 

you erase our marriages 

line by line, right by right. 

But we have always been here. 

In whispered phone calls at 3 a.m., 

in bars with no signs, 

in the quiet squeeze of a hand 

under restaurant tables. 

We are not new. 

We are not your experiment, 

your sin, 

your 'phase.'

We carry tombstones in our pockets, 

mourn those we lost, 

refuse discarded by your kind. 

We stand on the shoulders

of drag queens who threw bricks 

so we could kiss in daylight. 

So don’t tell me to be quiet. 

Don’t tell me to be patient. 

We have waited too long, 

buried too many, 

loved too hard, 

to beg for scraps of rights 

we already bled for. 

I am not your rainbow decoration. 

I am a storm you thought you survived. 

I am a love letter you tried to burn. 

I am still here, 

louder than you ever imagined, 

and I will not disappear. 

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Sam Harty is a queer poet whose work explores love, loss, survival, identity, and belonging. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She is the author of Lost Love Vol. II and Sam the Poet Coloring Book. When not writing, she volunteers with a sexual trauma crisis hotline.

Follow Sam on Instagram: @samharty16 and Facebook: Sam Harty