The Reveal
At dinner that night, I showed the book to my moms.
The room stilled. My mom Jasmine reached for it with shaking hands. My other mom, Ruth, put her arm around her shoulders.
“Where did you find this?” Jasmine whispered.
“Library sale,” I said, too casual, as if my heart wasn’t pounding. “It says she was a Beat poet.”
Jasmine nodded slowly. “She was my mother. I never got the chance to know her. She died before I was born.”
Her voice cracked, but she kept going.
“She wrote that book in secret. My grandmother told me it was lost.”
The silence grew heavy, but it wasn’t empty. It was filled with memory, possibility.
Selena Carter, my grandmother, a queer Black woman in the Beat Generation—something the world forgot, something my family carried in fragments.
Ruth kissed Jasmine’s temple. “She’s with us now,” she said softly. “Through you. Through him.”
Through me.
