From “The Uncured World”

Elisabeth Frost

I decide to name my body. Jane. Jean. Janet. I’ve never liked names that begin with that uncertain sound, wobbling between consonant options like a bowling pin on the fritz. But I need to embrace a thing I have never cared for. As a kid I loved the game of telephone, one mishearing after another, the transformation, the delight at the end when the secret of the final whisperer was unveiled. Incense, insect, instant. Drench, trench, wrenched. Language, languish, anguish. We played at the margins of the senses, pretended loss where there was none, made the privilege of hearing into a game. One erasure, another erasure. Janet—unfixed, unmoored, unwell—time to mobilize.

Mississippi

E Etherlbert Miller

death surrounds itself with the living i watch them take the body from the house i’m a young kid maybe five years old the whole thing makes no sense to me i hear my father say          lord jesus what she go and do this for i watch him walk out the backdoor of the house i watch him walk around the garden kick the dirt stare at the flowers & shake his head  shake his head he shakes his head all night long

yazoo jackson vicksburg we must have family in almost every city i spent more time traveling than growing up guess that’s why i’m still shorter than my old man he don’t like to stay in one place much he tell me soon as people get to know your last name seem like they want to call you by your first boy    if someone ask you your name tell them to call you mississippi not sippi or sip but mississippi

how many colored folks you know name mississippi

none see

now you can find a whole lot of folks whose name is canada just like you can find 53 people in any phone book whose name is booker t. washington

your mother she was a smart woman gave you a good name not one of them abolitionist names

what you look like with a name like john brown or william lloyd garrison that don’t have no class

your mother she named you after the river cause of its beauty and mystery just like my mother named me nevada cause she didn’t know where it was