Content Warning: Mention of blood
Fiona,
I have always loved my name
it holds me in a way
I can’t tell
if it belongs to me or I belong to it.
When someone gives me the gift of my name
I am known. I can claim responsibility.
When I speak to myself Fiona ,
I fear the kindness in my voice.
I would like to kill the craving in my body
to memorialize the kind things people have said of me,
have given to Fiona
or even just what people have said of me, like fact
which I wish to claim
though I tend to deny.
If I bathe in kindness, I fear I will drown.
In each Fiona I whisper or quiver,
something slithering between the letters,
pages losing their binding, slipping from
the hands to the
floor.
With Fiona, blank space billows from my tongue.
Fiona on my lips is the loosening of a jar lid,
it’s the grip that your words have,
how I take them over my own.
When they say Fiona I store it like acorns,
my name on your lips is a life raft I am sure
I will need to cling to in the winter
when I fall through the ice of a frozen river, intent on making it
with delicate steps, losing pounds with a light conscience.
Fiona on my lips is how I look at myself
again, again through screens and mirrors, behind hands
to make sure I can find something beautiful.
Fiona on my lips is proving you right,
an assurance I don’t need to save each instance of you adoring me
in direct quotations, hide my phone screen from the crowd so
no one
can
accuse me
of arrogance.
And Fiona is how I don’t find beauty when I look too
hard because I've become so
serious in the search.
With Fiona there follows desperation for words
so truth-drenched I need them inked into
my skin. Some sort of
name tag that people will read
so they can see beyond the body–
something inside extracted, no
seeping to the surface
like blood by the teeth in a moment of passion.
I believe the falter in Fiona
is the strike-slip fault
of saying
“I know who I am.”