I wrote this graphic poem in a coffee shop in Spokane, Washington in the midst of my first book tour. I was overrun with anxiety, both about my future and about my daily survival as a queer femme traveling alone. One night, I had a dream in which I served as a giraffe’s midwife. I’m not much for dream interpretation, but when I woke up I felt I had experienced some poetic evidence that the future was not some dreamy, naive, perfection—it was eager to meet me, and I deserved to see it. “Giraffe’s Midwife” imagines a future in which I dare to be alive and wanted, a future in which things are not always beautiful but we are still here, and therefore it is a future that contains beauty.
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