Here in the great Northwest
half my name
is lost in translation.
배민욱
used to be my name
when I was a schoolboy,
an ex-future astronaut
or a professional soccer player. I
don’t remember which one it was
Dad approved of.
But now I want to be a bum
who writes poetry over stale coffee
and my name is Min Bae,
Min Buy or Bay or By and
Bye--
And it’s no one’s fault, really.
A neat compromise between an Oriental tongue
and a White one: one kept a syllable; the other
mistook one. After all,
they’re both just as red
and wet.
Last week, mom called from across the Pacific
with the name she birthed me in 1987.
It rang foreign in my ears. When I repeated it
she just cried.
Now, five years ago, a father disowns me.
In exchange, I get to forget
those bruises he left on ummah’s skin,
a colorblind’s rainbow of purple, brown, and yellow
they were also black.
A win-win.
Not really.
Here in the great Northwest,
half my name is eight hours behind me.
It wanders through the ticking and tocking of
Tijuana hours
like a stray dog, just as I left it
a decade ago
for a man in my likeness.
And I’m afraid
to wait for it; afraid of its barking
and of men who steal dogs at night for boshingtang,
of bruised rainbows and shattered ashtrays,
of the red tongue that shouts Bitch!
in my mother’s tongue, and
of being reclaimed
by the blackness of my hair and yellowness of my skin and
those eyes that stare back when
I’m naked in the mirror.
Here in the great Northwest,
between the Rockies and the Pacific
wide enough to swallow a hundred peninsulas,
half my name is lost
in translation.
Still, I won’t ask for a correction
or believe
that
no one is
or isn't
to blame.
