“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

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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.

Julie Marie Wade

Julie Marie Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. She has published ten collections of poetry and prose, most recently Same-Sexy Marriage: A Novella in Poems and The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose, co-authored with Denise Duhamel. Wade reviews regularly for Lambda Literary Review and The Rumpus and makes her home on Hollywood Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats.