I Learned My Name Was Not My Name

I Learned My Name Was Not My Name* Jeremy Michael Clark (bio) He threw it from within the roomwe never used unless company came. The radio’splastic scattered in the kitchen, my mother’s scalpsplit until it bled. My stepfather called meevery name except my own. His backhandfed me silence. A gag of knuckles. When I tried to fightit wasn’t enough. I can’t remember if my brotherhid. The neighbors must’ve heard, must’vegroaned, Not again. He stood over me & said, Whyyou stick up for her? She hasn’t even told youwho your daddy really is. I was seven. The blood had setin my mother’s nightgown. She was trying to blotthe stains. When I learned my name wasnot my name, I became nobody’s ghost. I grew insideout. I curled my lips between my teeth & bit downto not scream. He said, I’ll give you somethingto scream about–– Now, most nights I sleep with the radio on.I dream something hovers above me as I sleep.My mother says blood can still be treatedwith ice water, that a ghost is someone nobody believesyou’ve seen. When company came, he calledhimself father, though that may have been a dream,the last image before I woke. Over the music,a muffled voice bleeds through the wall.I sip from the glass on my desk. I pressagainst the cold, to hear–– [End Page 257] Jeremy Michael Clark JEREMY MICHAEL CLARK, a native of Louisville, KY, has received fellowships from Cave Canem and The Conversation Literary Festival, and has attended the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. His poems and interviews have appeared in Callaloo, Forklift, Ohio, The Rumpus, Pluck!, Day One, and The Conversant. He currently lives in Newark, New Jersey, where he is an MFA candidate at Rutgers University-Newark. Footnotes * After Robert Hayden’s poem “Names.” Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

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