I could not outrun my name

nor the expectations that came with it.

You wore it as a badge

I wore it as a curse.

For All That I Remembered
by Michael R. Burch

For all that I remembered, I forgot
her name, her face, the reason that we loved ...
and yet I hold her close within my thought:
I feel the burnished weight of auburn hair
that fell across her face, the apricot
clean scent of her shampoo, the way she glowed
so palely in the moonlight, angel-wan.

The memory of her gathers like a flood
and bears me to that night, that only night,
when she and I were one, and if I could ...
I’d reach to her this time and, smiling, brush
the hair out of her eyes, and hold intact
each feature, each impression. Love is such
a threadbare sort of magic, it is gone
before we recognize it. I would crush

my lips to hers to hold their memory,
if not more tightly, less elusively.

Published by The Raintown Review, The Eclectic Muse, Kritya, Gostinaya (in a Russian translation by Yelena Dubrovin), Boston Poetry Magazine, Freshet, Jewish Letter (Russia), Poetry Life & Times, Sonnetto Poesia, Trinacria, The New Formalist, Pennsylvania Review

Keywords/Tags: Memory, remembrance, love, name, features, face, hair, eyes, lips, crush, impression, recognize, recognition, remember, remembered, forgot, forgotten, angel, wan, night, flood

It's strange the way I am
My name is always different to others
Ash, Ashlyn, Lyn.
I've been called other names, too.
******, Crazy, Insane, Wreck
Wrong, Right, Girl.
I mean..they're not wrong.
But I have a name you know.

softly-uttered
sweet-sounding
syllables

I whisper them with deep mad longing

words
turn
into
poetry

in your name

Beloved

your voice paints a gentle need
so please call me a million times...












i'll write your name in thousand rhymes

dear quinn,

it's okay
to tell people

how to make
you feel
okay.

they'll call you
by the right name
and the right pronouns.

and if they don't,
they will have lost
a part
of what it is
to be
human.

and that isn't
your fault.

love,
quinn

ARD,
The initials of my name.
I hate 2/3 of
That dreaded sequence.
I would redefine
This personality of mine
Under a new name,
But then who would I be?

My name is an identity
Everything else
Just call those credentials