the blueshift journal

Because it is easier on the American tongue.

You: crown in the middle of the long syllabic history of my name;

when asked who I am,

I conjure you first because no one trusts a name they can’t pronounce.

 

Because when I say my first name, it is threatened for the trash:

Don’t you have a nickname or something?

It would make other mouths, skinny tongues,

comfortable if I stop holding onto what makes me a border.

 

Etymology: Grecian 

Traded: English

Sold: American

 

little sailboat of a name to the shores of my mother’s lips.

Leaving Nigeria with two shirts,

Mother sung America with a tongue fumbling its way to prosperity.

 

In callouses and thigh burns:

Father worked factory jobs.

dreaming in degrees,

 

Working towards his America.

Center of the Universe.

I come from a long line of people eating their past for another future.

 

My name was their first song about America.

I sing a different song: A history in the blood.

And what, little dark-skinned white girl, do you even know about Nigeria?