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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 8: June 2021
Poem: 119 words
By Kevin Ridgeway

So Proud to Live, So Proud to Die

 
We bumped Paul Revere and the Raiders 
on a distant ’70s’ spin through needle grooves 
and pops of analogue from out of the speakers 
of our rented car stereo. We chanted along, 
our cultural identities confirmed in order to 
add needed flavor to our otherwise boring 
Caucasian genetics. We were curious 
young men in search of a culture to call 
call our own, lost on a highway bound 
for an inevitable, cruel truth we unlocked 
years later on Ancestry.com, when we 
discovered that our Mother was wrong 
—we didn’t have a single drop of Cherokee 
blood in our DNA, leaving us both whiter 
than either one of us had been before.

 

Kevin Ridgeway
Issue 8, June 2021

is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press) and nine chapbooks of poetry including Grandma Goes to Rehab (Analog Submission Press, UK). His work can recently be found in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Plainsongs, San Pedro River Review, The Cape Rock, Trailer Park Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Cultural Weekly, and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.

 
 
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