Name
by Eric Todd
I’m sorry I expected you to follow me into such heavy traffic.
We tried so hard to give ourselves names that keened
“We will never again be salted or allow our cheeks to flush.”
We screamed “My name is not a handful of sand!”
while building castles with leaky buckets, watering kudzu and wishing it were cacti.
Our name became one single interstate pockmarked with billboards to endorse our name
in glossy colored graphics and agreeable fonts.
Our name suggested we would no longer be called workers or drones,
but instead grow fat on the fat of other drones and force workers to eat each other
like guppies. Our name will lose twelve point six billion dollars this year or
thirty-five million dollars a day or one point four million dollars an hour or
twenty-four thousand dollars a minute or four hundred dollars a second.
We told our children their name was dollars,
and they understood it to mean novelty stopwatches. Our name will become
synonymous with sleep and fake names. Our name will hire
extra help and send out uniform Christmas cards with dancing
sheep cartooned on the covers. Our name will be known for its maudlin irony
and tearlessly contrite sense of humor. Our name will be the second best thing we have
going next year. Our name will generate publicity like a bear fight. Our name will designate colored sand and accurately sift through tiny plastic hour glasses.
We will, as always, define ourselves in opposition.
Our name will declare itself sovereign and identify as a whale.
Our name will practice lying, manufacture handsome images, and invent a new religion. Our name is a new religion.
Our name will shake the hands of possums and rabid wolves alike.
Our name will not make value judgments.
Our name will not be caught dead without an umbrella.
Our name will not, for long, be our name.
This poem first appeared in University of Houston’s literary and arts journal Glass Mountain.
Eric Todd is a visual artist, writer, and musician who has served as an editor for the NANO Fiction literary journal, a writer for the ESPN affiliate Red94, and co-founder of {exurb}, an art collective that explored the conjunction of science, art, and technology through large-scale, kinetic and interactive sculpture. {exurb} had the solo exhibitions waveForms, University of Indianapolis (2013), Topologies, Lawndale Art Center, Houston (2015), and Array, Art League Houston (2016), among others. Todd was featured artist at Day for Night festival in 2016. His work is held in the State of New Mexico’s Art Collection. Originally from West Tennessee, he received his BFA from the University of Houston in Creative Writing and Theatre and is currently pursuing post-baccalaureate work in Electrical Engineering.
Photos by William Cordray
Knell 