The Queer Gaze

a Spoken Word Poem

by Gynger St Clare
🫶🤍❤️🩷🧡👩🏻‍🦰🍯
August 17, 2025

i was on the Junction Bridge in Little Rock, Arkansas, this week, camera in hand, looking up and out and through

the Junction Bridge is a railroad bridge, built in the 1870s, to shuttle trains across the Arkansas River

it has a section that raised and lowered to let boat traffic pass up the river — 

or down the river depending on ur perspective — and under the bridge

the elevator shaft behind the bench — 
once meant to lift people 
toward pedestrian 
progress 
across the bridge — 




has long since failed

it doesn’t rise

it doesn’t work

but at the top, 
there are benches
and on those benches,
brass nameplates


donors

wealthy whyte men no doubt
who bought a piece of the bridge
(funded some long forgotten aspect of the Bridge Remodel project)

bought visibility

bought the illusion of forever

i sat at the far end and observed
graffiti bloomed across the glass 
like wildflowers 
in a place 
they weren’t meant to grow

every color a 

protest
every tag a 

name,


like a weed
hoping to survive the erasure

eventually,
someone will come to clean it
they’ll scrub the reds
and yellows
and pinks
away
but they’ll leave the brass
untouched

sanctioned permanence, 
state-approved memory

the point of buying a space 
for your name 
in public

is  not just to be remembered
but to be protected —
to be the name 
that gets to stay 
when all the others 
are wiped away



i think about my own names —
my state sanctioned name and
the one i lovingly chose

one fits
one is legal

i’ll likely be buried under the dead one
unless i pay enough
unless i buy police protection for my chosen name
in a town not built with me in mind
this image is a record of presence

a name that won’t wait for permission
a quiet kind of claiming

a queer gaze