By Wesley Little
11th grade | Community School of Davidson | North Carolina
Finalist, Human Rights category

With lines from “The Queens of Queen City” by Rae Garringer and Michael O. Snyder, a Pulitzer Center reporting project

Out there, somewhere between
the North and the South,
Somewhere between Appalachia and the flatlands,
stands a family of people like
me.

Flowers marked as weeds and
plucked from the ground.

Survivors torn down and
written out of history.

The city of Cumberland passes down
stories to me through her queens, her daughters.
Those into which she’s breathed life
tell me of her prosperous past.

A city once bustling in the twenties,
has since gone quiet. All quiet except
the laughter that is heard down each and every block.

I stroll through the city’s streets,
drawn to the sweet sound of music and laughter.

I listen to all of it.

Her queens, they perform and twirl and dip and tell
the stories of their old Cumberland and those who
helped her become who she is.

The legacy of queens who were not afraid
to turn fear into joy,
to turn violence into pride,
to turn people into a family,
to turn a city into a home.

Here, I soak up decades of local queer history through stories.
That innovation born of absence.

I listen
and I watch

a family protecting and caring for one another;

the queens, who stand patiently in the sun,
arm in arm with each other.

Through violence and crimes
against those they love, a family that fights for one another -
and will never stop fighting - all while trying
not to break a nail or an ankle as they slip
into bedazzled heels

I watch all of this.
And I smile.

And somewhere in me
a kid smiles and wipes the tears off of
their glittered cheeks.

Wesley Little is a rising senior from Davidson, North Carolina. Wesley leads others in laughter both in and outside of classrooms and helps strengthen her peers as one of Community School of Davidson’s Varsity Cheer Captains. Many would describe Wesley as fun and lighthearted, but her immense curiosity of the minute beauties of everyday life provides a unique voice to her poetry and prose pieces.

Read more winning entries from the 2024 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.