Name
I didn’t come out of the womb knowing my name
But I have it stitched like peeling scar on my body
and damn it I take it in me as my own
The first name, full-throated and multi-syllabic
The second Puerto Rican, stamped on me after
My prima who paints bursting flowers and swelling shores
Rosa Parks' maiden name is my last one
It’s stone-heavy with whiteness and ownership
But That Special Woman shares it too
So this last name I claim as my own,
in my Blackness
I am a Black woman stomping
And stepping in this name
I am a Puerto Rican woman salsa-shimmying
in this name
This name is made of bubbling slave blood
This name is made of Guayanilla coqui-skin
And chitlins
This name sounds like a sweet dirge on a Sunday morning
This name hollers like the scream you can’t keep in
I shout soliloquies in this name, I weep laments
in this name,
I tear my hair out in this name and I
Come back from the aging depths
In this name
I am this name and I don’t give a damn if you remember it.
But I have it stitched like peeling scar on my body
and damn it I take it in me as my own
The first name, full-throated and multi-syllabic
The second Puerto Rican, stamped on me after
My prima who paints bursting flowers and swelling shores
Rosa Parks' maiden name is my last one
It’s stone-heavy with whiteness and ownership
But That Special Woman shares it too
So this last name I claim as my own,
in my Blackness
I am a Black woman stomping
And stepping in this name
I am a Puerto Rican woman salsa-shimmying
in this name
This name is made of bubbling slave blood
This name is made of Guayanilla coqui-skin
And chitlins
This name sounds like a sweet dirge on a Sunday morning
This name hollers like the scream you can’t keep in
I shout soliloquies in this name, I weep laments
in this name,
I tear my hair out in this name and I
Come back from the aging depths
In this name
I am this name and I don’t give a damn if you remember it.
May 2024
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is a writer, poet and university professor. The author of the cross-genre collection, Scar On / Scar Off, the short story collection When Trying to Return Home, and the poetry collection Kinds of Grace. Her work has been a New York Times Editors' Choice, Kirkus Best Fiction Book of the Year, Most Anticipated Book to Read in 2023 by Today and long listed for the Aspen Words Prize. She has been granted fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and is faculty at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and the Yale Writers' Workshop.
Art: Abies Religiosa, Itzpapalotl, y Yo by Kat Cervantes