Another Black man has been murdered in our streets. And I am white as a ghost haunting my own grief. Thinking, who am I to feel grief? Thinking, my god, who am I not to?

I am writing to tell you about 1998, when Matthew Shephard, a young gay man from Laramie, Wyoming, was tied to a fence, beat with the butt end of a pistol til his skull cracked, left for eighteen hours in Wyoming's frozen cold, his face entirely covered in blood, except for the places his tears had washed clean.

I'm writing to tell you I was in a coffee shop in Seattle, holding my love's hand when I heard the news. The grief tsunami'd from my eyes immediately down to my knees. I could feel them buckle, each one of them, like a Bible belt snapping around the neck of an eighteen hour scream.

On the street outside the coffee shop, I could feel my last bit of unburied faith reach for the shovel in the dug-out grave of my chest. I could feel my own mother kissing Matthew’s forehead in a hospital where she knew even the doctor’s god was rooting for a flat line. For weeks, I couldn’t look at anyone I loved, anyone I loved, without imagining hate crushing their spines into a powder that would be snorted at a party after a football game.

Four months prior, James Byrd Jr., a Black man from Jasper, Texas, had been chained to the back of a truck, dragged for three miles along the concrete, conscious the entire time, till his head was severed and his remains were found in eighty-one separate places along the side of the road.

I am writing to tell you that I do not remember where I was or how I felt when I heard that news. For a lot of our community, 1998 was the year only Matthew Shepherd died.

I am writing to tell you, I have been spending a lot of time thinking, who are my people? What determines whose death will storm my chest, will flood my eyes, will make me wanna burn down a fucking city and pray with every ounce of my winded grace that more than the smoke will rise?

Last year, an older gay man in my neighborhood shot himself in his head in his own bed. After his family refused to attend the funeral, refused to collect his belongings, the mattress was hosed off, tossed in the backyard and his house was foreclosed.

I heard a rumor that the house was gonna sell for an incredible deal. I immediately imagined flocks of straight people going on and on about how his grave would look fabulous with a granite countertop. I kept picturing the holiday party they would throw in the bargain of his unlivable pain. His life nothing but a stain to them, nothing but something to scrub into the rug in the new nursery.

I had walked by his house for weeks, imaging an SUV full of soccer cleats running back and forth over his ghost in the driveway. I had been up all night, picturing what I would say to whatever thief would have the audacity to rip up his garden and plant Bermuda grass when I finally said to my friend: 'ya know, I been writing for sixteen years, and the word ‘gentrification’ has never made it into a single one of my poems.'

Who are my people? Where is my rage when they are stealing brown and black people’s homes?

Last week, someone posted a comment on my Facebook page that said, ‘you’re the kind of bitch it would be a pleasure to hang.’ And that was tucked in between thousands of other comments, equally as fucked, some of them like yours from people in the queer community who furiously disagreed with the post I wrote about Mike Brown being murdered by a white supremacist system designed to murder the hearts, bodies, and spirits of people of color.

Something difficult to stomach in this life is the fact that we might all learn and grow at a pace that will hurt people, but I am writing to tell you that I am furious with my own pace, furious that I could be holding the candlestick of a microphone for this many years and have it burned this far down without shining a hell of a lot more light on the truth of what I know white is. You wanna know what white is? White is having somebody tell you you’d be a pleasure to hang, having a whole lot of people agree, and not even thinking to lock your door that night. White is knowing that if somebody is going to be hung, you are not the one. White is having all of Eric Garner’s air in our lungs tonight, no matter how queer we are, no matter how anything we are.
If we are white, we have Eric Garner’s air in our lungs tonight and that means our breath is not ours to hold. That means our exhale is owed, is owed to mercy, to the riot of our unowned hearts, to the promise that who we weep and fight and tear down the sun for will not only be our own faces in the mirror. To the knowing that we canot ever, ever be married to apathy without wearing the rings of the fucking poplar tree when our country is still lynching, is still calling the hung bodies shade. When our country is right now rolling a red carpet from the blood that pours and people are dying. dying for us to notice our footsteps are red. Our silence is not a plastic gun. It is fully loaded. It has lethal aim. It is 1998 and James Byrd Jr. is not yet dead.

He is walking from a party towards his house on the other side of town, and you and I are somewhere. We are somewhere, pouring what we will pour into the cups of our hearts, spilling what we will spill into the screamed open Earth.