Joni

Abstract

Joni Maya Jewell Zeller (bio) would have been your name, had you been a girl, had your ultrasound shown you with a split between your legs and no penis. Had you been a girl, we'd have been sure what we wanted to call you even if we didn't share it, we'd have kept Joni like a small rock in our pockets, the kind you rub for luck, so it grows more and more smooth until the day you finally show it to someone, and there it is, its familiar little striations and grooves everyone else still has to learn. But you came out blue like Joni's river, the kind you skate away on, the way she wants to and to tell the truth I wanted to skate away, it was summer and too hot for skating and too late for really reconsidering so I lay in my hospital bed, my neck hurting and my body hollow with the crime of your birth. They were able to bring you out of the blue, wrap you and pin your arms with a stiff felt U to still your thrashing. And you lay in your room waiting for your name like an echo waits in a canyon, all that space and yet nowhere to go so it keeps bouncing off those high hard walls and coming back to us, a ripple of a ripple of air, of something someone shouted in joy or pain, back and forth between the origin and the stopping point, until the last piece of it soaks into the rock—and then it is gone. [End Page 161] Maya Jewell Zeller Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of Rust Fish and Yesterday, the Bees. Her poems and essays appear widely. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Maya edits fiction for Crab Creek Review and teaches poetry and poetics at Central Washington University. She lives in Spokane. Copyright © 2016 University of Nebraska Press