You Are

Gemma Ortwerth is a Baltimore-based creative with published and award-winning writing. Her work focuses on the intersections of queerness, neurodiversity, transness, disability, and the desire to uplift marginalized voices. Gemma plans to vie for a position on the Baltimore City LGBTQ Council in the near future.

Instagram: @gemma.ortwerth

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Threads: @gemma.ortwerth

Bluesky:  @gemma-ortwerth.bsky.social

“You Are” 

You are light caught in motion,

warmth that lands on skin

and gives us permission

to exist as we are.

There is beauty in your essence,

but a fiercer current moves beneath:

the steady pulse of your laugh,

the way your eyes hold a powerful, radiant gravity

at the small miracles—

a sparrow balancing on a wire,

a joke remembered mid-story.

I have watched a room move with you,

cups stilled, conversations dissolving,

as if awe itself had to take a seat.

You are powerful

not for how the eyes witness you,

but for how others feel luminous

and safe in your presence.

Your being proves that strength can be soft.

Your touch quiets all that aches;

your voice makes even still air listen.

If doubt ever knots itself within you,

I will untangle it carefully,

naming each thread after what you've survived,

until your own name hums in your chest.

You deserve the morning that waits

without demand or hurry,

the arms that embrace without question,

the kind of love

that never asks you to make yourself smaller.

And if the universe has eyes,

they widen each time you pass.

It grows kinder,

more possible,

because you are here.