We were having coffee with Jane at the Chocolate Fish cafe, sitting at the outside tables by the beach and over the road from the cafe itself.  Hitomi was about to burst, so it must have been late August. A wonderful late winter’s day in Wellington, with beautiful sunlight and a nasty wind-chill factor.

We got on to the topic of whether ‘it’ was a boy or a girl. For most of the pregnancy both of us had been, in traditional fashion, very coy when the topic arose. By this time, however, with only a couple of weeks to go until the due date we were less guarded. We told Jane that ‘it’ was a girl, and the talk naturally moved to names.

Up until then we had also been a bit coy with regard to telling people our likely picks for baby names, just in case they were ‘baby name robbers’, who wanted to steal the outstanding baby name we had fretted over for such a long time and give it to their own babies. Anyway, at this point, we figured that telling Jane our great baby name idea was no big deal.

“Mimi,” I said.

”I beg your pardon?” came Jane’s puzzled reply.

“‘Mimi’ is our current favourite,” I said. “We want something that is short, cute, and sounds good in English as well as Japanese.”

Hitomi explained. “We want something that the kid will be happy with, regardless of whether we are living here or back in Japan. The word ‘mimi’ means ‘ear’ in Japanese, but we would use different characters to give it a different meaning. Japanese people wouldn’t think ‘ear’ when they called her name.”

“Oh,” said Jane.

“It’s easy for both Japanese people and English speakers to pronounce,” I added.

“Where do you see yourselves living in the future?” Jane asked.

“Not really sure,” we said in unison.

“Well,” started Jane. “If you think she might be going through the school system here in New Zealand, then you might want to think of a different name.”

“Why do you say that,” I asked.

“Well, when we were at school in the seventies and eighties, we would learn a bit of Maori language, right? Greetings and things, yeah?”

She was right. Learning some Maori words had been part of the curriculum for a long time. Every New Zealander can smuggly rattle off the numbers one to ten, and feel like they are exhibiting a high degree of prowess in the native language.

“So?” I queried.

“Well, things have moved on,” said Jane. ” In some schools, the kids even end up being able to hold a decent conversation in Maori.”

“OK,” I said. “So what has this got to do with our choice of baby names?” I asked.

Well,” started Jane again. “Nowadays, every seven year old in the country knows that ‘mimi’ means ‘urinate’ in Maori.”

by Mia’s dad
Dubai, United Arab Emirates

I used to say I didn’t write because of my name: Michelle Hoppe.

Michelle Hoppe is a Los Angeles writer/actress. I’m an unemployed Florida English teacher/writer. She played the guidance counselor in a reversed Shakespearean comedy Ten Things I Hate about You. I played nun #45 in a school production of The Sound of Music. She is a pornographic novelist. I am a Mormon. Her website has a single red rose draped seductively across the opening of a blurry-paged novella and fine white print on a black screen irrelevantly warning away minors. I masked pride and fear, for pride is fear, behind the question, How could I ever make it away from that name?

But I now proclaim–irrelevantly, as I assume someone is reading this–that I do write, and there came a time when I had to submit my first cover letter. I’ve heard cover letters are legendarily archived when ridiculous. Phrases like, “My mother really loved this story, and she thinks you will too,” or “My writing group expressed extreme like, even love, for my work. I’ve sent you this same story three times. Please take me seriously” are kept for editor posterity. Cover letters are the art of selling oneself, the paper equivalent of an interview, so I don’t know what I was thinking when I submitted,

Dear Editor,

Bio: Someday I’d like to be published as M. R. H., as opposed to Michelle Renee Hoppe or Michelle Hoppe. M. R. Hoppe sounds a little too sci-fi or fantasy for what I’ve written. Michelle Hoppe is the name of the actress who played a dirty guidance counselor in Ten Things I Hate about You. She’s a dirty novelist in real life who publishes under my name (name strumpet!). Maybe someday I’ll get married and all my problems will be fixed. I’m asking these questions now because I have yet to be published. You could change that, wink wink. Now I feel like a strumpet.

Thank you for your consideration,

M.R.H.

The next day: panic. Aside from felonies and misdemeanors, there was absolutely nothing to be done. Two months later I received a reply.

Dear Michelle,

Thanks for submitting your work to . . .  Unfortunately, I can’t use it for our next issue.  I would, however, love to see more work in the future.

Thanks again,

Poetry Editor

P.S.  I was honestly much more drawn to the style and tone of your bio. Do you have any poems that are looser, like that?

By M.R.H.
Satellite Beach, FL

In front of the rabbi’s
Old Chevrolet station wagon
They saw engraved words on
The wall. They were the words
Of a minor prophet, a disciple
Of Isaiah’s, they later discovered,
A proponent of peace and ‘Walking
Humbly with your God’…they liked
The way the vowels rolled simply
Off the tongue—Little did they realize?
The annoyance, mispronunciations
And taunting that would follow
Later, there was a Bar Mitzvah and
My namesake’s identity came up
Again and I spoke to his philosophy
To the best of my abilities as if I were
Supposed to be an embodiment—
Outside of the synagogue, it was a
Different story, non-Jewish friends,
Teachers, librarians, strangers
Wanted to call me Mike, Michael,
Mikhail, Mick, anything but the two syllable
Sound that seemed so simple to me
When kids took Earth Science
In junior high, they learned of
Its’ other definitions—
I was the shiny crystalline stuff
They saw embedded in the sidewalk
Or the stuff they sprayed in their shoes
To ward off foot fungus
Either way, they would step on the shiny sparkles
That were me and laugh
Until I would openly smirk or grimace—
Upon reading this tale, someone would
Play me a miniature violin
Of melancholy and point a finger,
Yet, to this very day, people want to say
My name, no matter how obscure or popular
It might get, something other than what it is
Even my friend, Abdullah, and his name
Is Abdullah, and you would think he’d have
No excuse but to learn, calls me Mike no
Matter how often I correct him—

by Micah Zevin
Bronx, NY

“Where is Corisa, short and Stoudt?” sang the counselor.

It was Summer Fun camp and I froze: mostly from the shock that until that moment no one besides me had thought of this mocking. It didn’t help that I was a Haole living in Hawaii which automatically made me not the shortest but definitely the largest student in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and at the time of this incident, 6th grade. I walked, head-down-compromising-smile, to my place in the morning line-up.

Stoudt was my dad’s last name (technically, my stepfather). It took 10 years for the school board to realize I had been living under a false identity. I remember it felt strange to be accused of this, as though we weren’t a family and had been lying. I had the choice of switching to my biological father’s name or having my present dad adopt me. No problem, dad said and he filed the paperwork. However, the other man involved refused to “give up” the children he had not seen for a decade.

“I’m changing my last name,” I told the boy I had a crush on – I don’t remember his name.

“What, are you getting married?”

I laughed and it felt good not to be a child bride only the product of divorce and remarriage.

Not much later my family moved to California. I was now in 8th grade shifting from one foot to the other in my polyester gym shorts and baggy white t-shirt outside the PE teacher’s office. Three Cholas walked by. The peaks of their bangs stood at least four inches high. I’d never seen anything like it. We didn’t have Cholas in Hawaii. They wore thick make-up on eyes and on lips and snug revealing jeans. Signs of a world I had yet to discover were tracked by the bruises on their necks. I was in awe.

“Corisa, what’s your last name?” the gym teacher asked trying to find me on the roster.

“Moreno.” The syllabus came out weakly.

The Cholas heard me. They stopped and had to ask, perhaps because of my poorly coiffed hair. “Mo-re-no. Are you Mexican?”

“My father’s Mexican,” I said. These are my people? I thought.

*

Amongst other things, it took studying Spanish and learning to dance Salsa for me to grow into my inner Latina, but really, I’ll always be a little Stoudt. The carnitas help with that.

by Corisa Moreno
Oakland, CA

Loretta Gail Morris was born in 1957, two months premature and small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. She was carried in a cardboard shoebox and slept soundly in a dresser drawer. I imagine day and night passed in irregular hours as the ceiling lamp sun and tan papered walls opened and shut periodically above her peach-sized head. Tiny fingers reached out, curled and reflexively retracted to avoid being trapped in the sliver between light and dark.

How large her parents must have seemed, a Mount Rushmore of towering new faces, their liquor breath as familiar as her mother’s skin. How loud they must have sounded, their familiar voices no longer muffled by the womb, and then muffled again when the drawer was shut. I wonder if the dark corners and wood smell calmed her, or if she waited in infant terror for them to return.

Loretta Gail’s mother and father raised her in rural West Virginia until she was removed from their home in the early 1960’s.

Loretta Gail McGlothlin became the least-valued new sibling in a family already containing two natural sisters, Patsy and Peggy. I imagine that as the house where she became fiercely religious, a Pentecostal Southern Baptist. She developed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. In one hand she held Him like an encyclopedia to explain all that had come before and in the other He was a shield she wielded to protect her against all that was to come.

Mama became Loretta Gail Shelton when she married in 1977 when she was 20, my father 22. They met in Virginia at a church group at which my father was the only man in the entire room with blonde hair and blue eyes. They courted for some time with frequent interruptions of military service until finally, my father asked Mama to marry him. Later he informed her that he had been prepared should she have said no. A date with a redheaded woman was broken by Mama’s affirmative response.

We three children will be born at the dawn of the Reagan era to young, southern military parents. Mama will begin making babies when she is just a baby herself, and will be broken into a grown up world through her responses to her children’s lives.

Her favorite name to be called by her children will be Mama. We won’t use it. Instead I will call her Mom. As I grow older she will become Ma, which she hates because she thinks it is vulgar and disrespectful. When I get particularly feisty I will call her Mother. This is far too formal for her taste and rings patronizingly like the use of a child’s full name when they have committed a crime. I will call her Ma long after I leave home until finally, without warning and without trying, I will begin to call her Mama. By then it is too late. She will be suspicious of me, sensing that I am ready to let her go. In 2007, the summer before Mama turns 50, I will.

by Dene Shelton
San Francisco, CA