Name Refrain
My heart contains an extra chamber
where I hide my name from the tide,
the only thing left to me
from the old days. Mine
until I swim the channel.

Named after a grandmother I never knew,
a sound translated from Hungarian into English,
picked by Edgar Allen Poe
whose Raven my mother recited at bed-time,
a solid thing that cast no shadow.

She didn't allow me a nickname.
I stayed who I was,
a girl who spoke to stray dogs on the run.
I see with the brown flecks
of my mother's green eyes,

I'm my father's voice in the shower,
my father who ripped across the Atlantic at such speed,
he diverted the current,
and my mother's attention
from bridling sea-horses with seaweed.

My parents wait for me to swim
past the weekend and beyond the bridge
where seagulls fly above water
looking for a drifting name,
any easy target for them to pick off.