arriving with a difficult to pronounce last name

should I be in love with my last name—
a complex four-syllable machination of some callow
afrikaans officer’s condemnation stationed

at a seaside port-of-entry some

two hundred years ago when they were imports
for sugar-cane plantations escaping caste systems
arriving on the southern tip of a dark

continent cast as another shade of bleak because
fine-tooth combs wouldn’t

stick in their hair—

and if that boer knew those coolies had been named
after divine gods he’d have clipped their wilting
angel’s wings and taught them

a thing or two about flying
too close to the sun or other such common mistakes

made by reversing the ‘a’ and ‘i’
putting I before everything else and exchanging the
end to a past

that never existed—

on snow-packed school yards when they insisted
do-you-own-a-brain and laughter pelted
like ice-balls at coffee-bean eyes on frozen

burnt-toffee faces—

or times when my sister would pretend we were french
for who in their right mind wouldn’t want to be
more neapolitan

than the chocolate bottom
on a triple-layer ice-cream stack—

and she’d say dei-oh-na-reine
with a flourish of tiny fingers accented
par le visage du mécontent as thin curls of smoke

coiled from the red-nosed tips of our candied fags
copiously clouding imaginations that one day
we’d be what

we didn’t quite expect—

mispronouncing lasagne or champagne the way
chris walken in the continental said it from below
a penciled mustache or the first

words you learn when you arrive at another distant port
this one as cold as your heart
might become—

je suis canadienne says justin trudeau and insists
this is who we are but in the end the imbroglio
wasn’t what any of us
really meant to be—

Pax Adams