My Family Asks Me to Speak

This poem discusses the role that voice and speech play in the marking of queer identity, and the ways in which the sound of one's voice can expose or "out" a person. The speaker of the poem is pressured by his family to speak at the dinner table as a sort of test to see whether or not he can pass as straight, which in turn prompts him to meditate on what it might be like to escape, to inhabit an entirely different reality than his current one.