“They Kept Putting a ‘D’ in Front of Her Name” by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

So it spelled Dumbell instead of Umbell.
Infuriating, after she’d twice corrected
the error by email.  Everyone
wants to mess with what’s yours,
make an ass out of a cluster.
An umbel is an inflorescence,
but just because some flowers radiate
from a single point, doesn’t give license
to butt a consonant where it doesn’t belong.
Like umbrella she’d said, like umbilical.
For the umpteenth time she explained,
her name was all she really had. Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

—Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor,  Eckleburg No. 22

Purchase Eckleburg No. 22

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, Meigs Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, is the author of The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook (2024), the poetrybook, Imperfect Tense (2016) and five other books on the arts of language and education. Recipient of six NEA Big Read Grants, a 2023 NEA Distinguished Fellowship, Hambidge Residency Award, and the Beckman award, her poems have appeared in Georgia Review, Bitter Southerner, Lilith, Poet Lore, Rattle, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. Read more at melisacahnmanntaylor.com.

The Editors

Eckleburg was founded in 2010 as an online and print literary and arts journal. We take our title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and include the full archives of our predecessor Moon Milk Review. Our aesthetic is eclectic, literary mainstream to experimental. We appreciate fusion forms including magical realist, surrealist, meta- realist and realist works with an offbeat spin. We value character-focused storytelling and language and welcome both edge and mainstream with punch aesthetics. We like humor that explores the gritty realities of world and human experiences. Our issues include original content from both emerging and established writers, poets, artists and comedians such as authors, Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, poets, Moira Egan and David Wagoner and actor/comedian, Zach Galifianakis.