I didn’t write The Trauma Bible to be brave. I wrote it because silence was killing me.
This isn’t just a book of poems. It’s a reckoning. A resurrection. A glitter-soaked gospel for anyone who’s ever flinched when the floorboards creaked. For the ones who sat in church pews trying to make themselves small. For the kids who learned to pray for escape before they even knew what “queer” meant.
The Trauma Bible: My Queer Psalms is a compilation of pieces I’ve written over the years—on notebooks, on the backs of napkins, in midnight Google Docs when sleep wouldn’t come. Some of these poems are autobiographical. Some are pulled from the lives of friends, their stories folded into mine. Some were born from thoughts I’ve carried around like splinters in my chest. But all of it is real. All of it is me. And every word fits the theme.
Each section is a chapter of survival, arranged like a queer kind of scripture—each psalm a glimpse into what it means to live through shame, abuse, sickness, love, joy, and everything in between. I wrote about being closeted in the church. About surviving abuse from people who should’ve protected me. About getting cancer. About working in broken systems while trying to stay whole myself. About love, sex, queerness, rage. About Barbie and Liberace. Lisa Frank stickers. Belt sermons. Microwave reflections. All the weird little things that made the world hurt—and also made it bearable.
Some of these poems are funny. Some are brutal. Some read like prayers I never meant to say out loud.
This book means everything to me because it’s the one I needed when I was 9, a scared boy hiding in plain sight.
When I was 14, traumatized and stripped bare in conversion therapy.
When I was 32, trying to rebuild a life out of grief and survival.
And when I was 40, on a mountain in Hawai’i, facing cancer with nothing but a scarred body and a stubborn will to live.
It’s not a book about healing perfectly. It’s a book about telling the truth anyway.
Why is it important? Because there are still queer kids being taught to be ashamed. Still adults carrying scars in silence. Still stories like ours being erased or softened to make other people comfortable. This is the version that doesn’t apologize.
This is that place. These are my psalms.
Not polished. Not performative. Just sacred in their survival.
I Sang Anyway
The choir moved on without me—
rising in polished harmony
while I sat in the pew like a cracked bell
with no rope left to pull.
They sang for a god I no longer believed in.
I sat for the silence.
My throat was a ruin,
burned and rebuilt by machines with no mercy to offer,
only function.
It itched like memory.
Swelled with silence.
My voice—once velvet—was now gravel, wind, and want.
But I sang anyway.
Not to be heard—
not for heaven or hope—
but to feel.
To prove that breath still lived
somewhere between pain and persistence.
It wasn’t pretty.
It wasn’t even on pitch.
But it was mine—
this hoarse hallelujah with no altar behind it,
no promise ahead.
Just me,
and a ragged note
gasped more than sung.
Not a hymn.
A human sound.
I sang for the child who learned to mouth words
in churches that wouldn’t claim him.
I sang for the patient
with a feeding tube and a soul that still hummed.
I sang for the boy who begged for a miracle
and made do with a melody.
I sang for me.
Not the healed me.
Not the brave me.
Just the me still covered in ash,
still crawling from the fire,
still breathing between scar and sound.
And if the note cracked, so be it.
If it wobbled, warbled,
barely made it past my lips—
it was still a song.
And I was still a singer.
Because not all gospels live in Bibles.
Some are stitched into hospital gowns,
woven through radiation masks,
whispered between sobs in parked cars
long after faith has left the building.
I sang anyway.
And in that moment—
even broken, I was whole.
Even hoarse, I was human.
Even fading, I was free.
Thanks for reading them.
Thanks for seeing me.
Thanks for still being here.
With breath and glitter,
— Bee