Letter from the Cumberland

They lived nearby, I was in the book, and what kind of name was —-,
anyway. My students blinked in the porch light. One day
they want to teach in town, having lived here all their lives.
They knew everyone: even the dregs at the liquor store,
the pregnant girl down the road, niggers, though not by name.
Their words rippled out, far from them, over the town
with its thousand steeples. Behind me, my family held
their poses in their tiny frames, each of us a shade lighter than
our parents. On the wall, my mother frowned, her closed mouth
about to break. When I left she said, Don’t tell them who you are.
And once, you warned, More people want us dead because we’re fags.
I closed the door, and watched them shift behind the screen.
I hated them. I hated them for all of us, though no one asked me to,
and wished them a lesson in pain. It wasn’t right, but I didn’t care.

from A Question of Gravity and Light.  University of Arizona Press.  2007. Used with permission of the author.

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Blas Falconer is the author of A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press 2007) and The Foundling Wheel (forthcoming Four Way Books Fall 2012). He is the coeditor of Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press 2010) and the poetry editor of Zone 3: A Literary Journal/ Zone 3 Press. A recent recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant and the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, he coordinates Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.

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Celebration Series is a bimonthly CAYENNE feature that aims to magnify and spotlight work by queer poets of color. To learn more, click here.

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