Poetry
Allegiance of Gratitude
After Allegiance, by Gurney Norman.
By Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
I pledge allegiance to Beaver Creek and Frogtown in Floyd County, Kentucky, the land that my papaw’s dad owned and that the bank took when a rock fell on my papaw in ‘77, that my dad has paid the taxes on for forty years so his cousins and their children might sleep and cry and laugh on the soil their ancestors imagined for them.
I pledge allegiance to forgotten places, to Martin Elementary School and the teachers who taught us fractions and commas and knew how to give us things like shoes and food in ways we could take them when the strip mines came and the jobs left and everybody felt broken, that same school that the flood would take time and time again when the trees were gone and nothing could hold back the angry waters, the school they blew up for the new road and paved over alongside a century’s worth of proms and basketball games and bake sales and first loves and grammar worksheets. I pledge allegiance to you Mrs. Gray, Mrs. Farmer, Mrs. Damron, Mrs. Mosley, women who loved us through muddy troughs and crests and Christmas trees and foreclosures and imagined only bright futures no matter the dimness of the present.
I pledge allegiance to my kin, even those who I ain’t talked to in over twenty years because your fear of my queerness was stronger than our blood. I am still a faggot. I won’t call you. I won’t want you. But as long as I have a roof, so do you, if you’re willing to sleep under mine.
I pledge allegiance to my cousin Marie, killed by pills, who once gave me a ceramic sign right out of her fishtank when I was in the 7th grade, cause I said I liked it, standing there in a pink housecoat while we waited on the bus and telling me that as long as she was alive I would be loved. And she ain’t alive, but her promise was bigger than time, because I am still loved and I feel her more now than ever so I pledge allegiance to that memory of knowing that some things are written in redder ink than pills or death.
I pledge allegiance to the people who didn’t want me, people who look like me and talk like me and remember the pain of seeing their mommies and daddies crying over empty cupboards and splintered hope, who remember the sight of a man covered in coalblack to make sure his children would eat. I will not turn on our shared story. I pledge to lift it up as a light big enough for you to see me under it and me to see you under it.
I pledge allegiance to my mamaw Bertha and her cream gravy with the pepper flakes that she can’t make anymore. As long as I am here it will be here too.
I pledge allegiance to the future of these hills, to men and women and everyone else having the same shot at life’s comforts as anybody else in this world, to a future where we can finally see that we are the mountains and the mountains are us, beyond time, beyond space, older than the rings of Saturn and witness to a half billion years of history, to dinosaurs and Native Americans and mammoths and white people and Black people and brown people and poetry and music and runaway kudzu and fast food chains.
I pledge to remember you, to find the good in you, to try to heal the bad in you, to give to you what you have given to me.
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.
Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. is a poet, novelist, educator, and public speaker from Floyd County, Kentucky. His debut collection Gay Poems for Red States won a Stonewall Honor Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2023 by Book Riot and the American Library Association. His novel Tore All to Pieces was published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2026. The 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year, he has testified before Congress and appeared on Good Morning America.