By Todd Campbell
Featured Art: “Derealization” by Sudiksha Gouda

1.

At the airport where I kill time
standing in a long line to order
coffee and a muffin, I’m stopped short
by the young woman on the other side
of the counter who asks me what’s a good name?
She’s called Crystal according to the tag
pinned to her chest and I have never liked
my name, its harsh aspirated opening T
and the leaden Ds at the end that land
with a thud. Unpleasant to the ear
for romance language speakers, unnatural
to pronounce in many Asian tongues.
Subtract one letter from the end
and it’s the German word for death. 

2. 

But what’s a good name? When my son
was little, I took pleasure in teaching him
names for the living things we ran across—
orca, osprey, crocosmia, trillium, possum,
raccoon, juniper, weeping willow. I believed
I was making a gift of the world to him,
one name at a time. Until one day, on a drive
through rolling hills past pear orchards
and fields of alfalfa, where redtail hawks
circled in the sky, his mother turned to me
and insisted, with surprising vehemence,
that I stop this naming of everything.
As if to name a thing is to capture it,
to possess it in some selfish way.  

3. 

For a time I frequented a tiny restaurant
with a counter where eight people watched
the chef transform that day’s ingredients
into handrolls that came three to a plate
for twenty dollars and were as close
to sublime as anything I have eaten.
He named the ingredients in each one
as he set it before his customers. One day
a man sitting next to me said, Yellowtail?
Isn’t that supposed to be called Hamachi?
Why not, the chef said with a grin.
The fish don’t really care what we call them. 

4. 

As a matter of record, what I’m called
is not really who I am. My birth certificate
lists my father’s name first. Not once
did my parents summon me that way,
or yell at me, or praise me. Which is fine.
I liked his name even less. But I have spent
years explaining to teachers, doctors,
bank tellers, customs officers, airlines,
and departments of licensing why I appear
to not be who I say I am. What’s a good name?
Crystal asks again. Todd’s fine I guess,
I say, though I’m still at a loss.  

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Todd Campbell is a speechwriter, poet, and mosaic artist based in Seattle, where he has lived for the past three decades. His poetry has appeared in Pangyrus, Poet Lore, Reed Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Watershed, and elsewhere.