Poem-a-Day

For the first month of life, I was 
unnamed. To my Mama, my body belonged 
to one name, and to my Babushka, another, so 

they called me Lyalya, Lyalichka, little 
doll, baby, because neither would bend 
their letters and though I was already known 

to scream, to refuse sleep and strangers, 
they couldn’t have known then how, 
silently, I’d keep screaming, keep refusing 

any name they’d give me, how in my mouth, 
it wouldn’t feel like mine, and on the tongues 
of others, even less like I belonged. 

My mother imagined me maiden, Alyonushka, 
who saves in every fairytale, saves her brother
when he is stolen by Baba Yaga’s wicked swan-geese

and turns him back into a boy when he becomes 
a goatling. Alyonushka, who stays silent
for seven years, sewing twelve sweaters

out of nettles, fingers raw, skinned, only 
to run out of time on the final sleeve, so her youngest 
brother must wear a wing instead of an arm, reminding her 

she’s failed. And in the painting, Alyonushka, 
keeps her eyes cast down on water, her feet 
bare and untouched against coarse stone, she is

meek and docile, alone, she would never leave 
or disobey her mother, so eventually, mine 
admitted this name could not belong to me.

A month before my birth, Dedushka Yuzya 
died, some sudden spell Soviet doctors
connected to his heart because they only knew 

it stopped, and in our people’s way of wearing
our dead, of carrying them along the gumline, 
Babushka named me Yulya, because its sound 

was closest to her love, because two syllables 
are an easier loss to bear, because 
like all our matriarchs, she wanted me named 

for a man none of us could save. How could they 
know such naming would curse us to a life worse 
than a single wing? What if I’d stayed, Lyalya,

from speech and voice, stayed screaming,
how many more of us could have been
saved? How many would have stayed

swan, refusing to give up the sky.