[Elizabeth Soto, Associate Editor: This poem demands to be chewed. The letters in her name demand to linger on the tongue, to find their way into the teeth until they are so stuck they have to be flossed out. What does it mean to be named? To be identified by a series of letters others refuse to string together? Paola Capó-García dares us to find out. To mull over the names that get trapped in our throats, and to still say them with our chests.]

Paola was my mother’s middle finger to my father’s mother who demanded I be named after her. Edith was too risky of a prophecy, my mother is not a gambler. 

Italian for small, which I tried to be my whole life and failed, according to the worst parts of myself. Perhaps she named me this as a prayer. 

Paola is every other girl’s name on my side of the world but far too exotic for this side. The sound of it a threat or expectation. 

Paola is what ails you, the lump in your throat, that dryness on your tongue, the marbles in your mouth, that thick silence before roll call, the heavy body undone and redone in your image, the fragile thing you must save and civilize. 

It’s that I’m-just-never-gonna-be-able-to-say-that, that bear-with-me, that weight, that wide-eyed massacre.