Sin Fronteras Spring 2018 Sin Fronteras 2018 | Page 20

My Name
Hiromi González
My name is a pause in roll-call,
Stuck between familiar names.
A popcorn kernel embedded in your gums,
Stuck between your teeth.
It is the root of the assumptions,
Of who I am,
And where I come from.
But these assumptions
Are tinged with confusion,
The name doesn’t quite fit the face,
Whatever that means.
Each time that they ask for a name at restaurants,
I fish one out from my “name bank.”
I usually settle on a “Sara,”
Or an “Ana,”
Anything of the like.
I didn’t always do this,
But, very quickly,
Reciting the same,
sequential,
simple,
six
Letters got old.
People tell me that my name is unique.
I guess it is here,
But little do they know that our neighbor across the Pacific
Has this name scrawled across a dotted line
On thousands of birth certificates.
But I guess that doesn’t matter,
All of that is far away.
If you type my name in a search bar,
You’ll find that my name means “vast ocean” in Japanese,
But when my classmates hear my name,
To them it just means “Asian.”
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