Nicky Beer

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Nicky Beer

My Fertility

 
Admittedly, I’ve never tried, so I don’t even know if it’s there.
But it’d be just like me, wouldn’t it, to waste something
for which so many of my friends have suffered, have longed.
I’d give it to them happily, though—the oiled, golden bowl of it.
Something so ancient about that word: suffering. You can almost see
the knitted shawl being pulled over the woman’s bowed head.
Sometimes a woman’s body seems full of nothing but the noes
the world has dropped into her like dull black coins. Her smile
whatever she’s learned to build around the rage. So I suppose
it’s true after all: there is something growing within me. And daily.
 

Nicky Beer reads “My Fertility”


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.