(fake) letter from mom after coming out 

I think you’d probably find it funny that while you flailed your way 
at last into the world, the bottom fell out  
 
of Chechnya, & later while Mother Russia trembled at the threat 
of total collapse, crowds congealed in Tbilisi  

to celebrate the birth of your revolutionary geographical twin,  
Georgia—guess I could have named you that,   

considering—but the projections coming out of the situation were limited 
& we were high as everyone’s expectations 

of violence in the collapse’s wake plus by then they’d told me  
you were a boy, so I told him 

to name you instead. What argument was there to be made?  
We just happen and keep happening, maps changing. 

Confusion ensues. Sometimes I wish I’d gotten half the coverage  
you did that day. Does that make me evil, Georgia?  

Do you regret my wishing for the sort of poetry I might’ve enlisted later  
when finding the words for my own revolutions 

instead of these invasions & incursions we’ve grown to expect? on camera 
old poets look quite out of place, 

like Frost at Kennedy’s inauguration, all snowfall along the roadside, awkward  
in the hungry eyes of glamor & I imagine the TV crews  

will always be desperate to push poets out before long, more interested  
in the afterbirth of nations & the turning of political tides 

than little gifts (when you were born, this would’ve been between commercials  
for He-Man figurines and their fine plastic muscles 

on the hospital TV). You are who I like to imagine most   
will be asked to speak, because as I knew you  

you’d have lyricized that conflict so sweetly though you’ve never been 
a revolutionary & only recently a separatist. 

I see you shake out that crimson flag, darling, shrug off 
those dollops of dried blood 

in transformation. “Smile now for the press, angel,” 
I might’ve said, probably expecting  

a soundbite, some photographs, some evidence I could point to later  
& say “Right there—that’s when I knew,” 

when I recognized you for the changeling I knew you’d become. 
All I had to do was wait.  

GARNET JUNIPER NELSON

Garnet Juniper Nelson is a queer writer birthed & corrupted in the American high desert who now writes from the Pacific Northwest. A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, their writing has most recently appeared in publications such as Salamander, Waxwing, Poet Lore, Ninth Letter, Frontier Poetry, december magazine, Salt Hill, & Pidgeonholes, and has received nominations for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. They currently teach writing at Centralia College.