what's in a name

You sir, your job
has changed continents.

Faced with the misplaced masses
of Europe, our suitcases full of
candlesticks and cholera, our seasickness
and the smell of Old World
disaster, you

counted us like the sheep we were
until you rested your head on our
yellowed maps, dreamed of the Balkans,
borders redrawn, snow like you've never
sunk foot in and hunger your family hadn't known
for generations. The sheep we were flocking to

New York, Boston, Halifax, Montreal

our heads counted like livestock when really,
we were moths fluttering papered wings
against the lantern of a new country
that promised, this time, they wouldn't burn us.

I am the first of a second generation
of women in my family to be literate
in a language that someone remembers
how to write.

You, sir, you named me.
My family's passport into this country
was a number tattoo and an X, and faced
with an unpronounceable name

you have changed me.

In my great-grandfather's tangle
of consonants, palatalized,
something that would have been written
in Cyrillic if he had spoken Russian, if he
had a passport, if they hadn't burnt down
our leaf-heavy family trees with the synagogue,

in the sound that was my name you pulled out
something you could recognize, a family
that was someone else's, maybe your friends,
a sound that would make us a home.

And so named after hot malted drink used
as a sleeping aid in most of the former British Empire,
we go bravely into this continent as
Horlicks:  "The food drink of the night!"

Look up my name on Wikipedia
and you find that it can be used as a
synonym for bollocks. Or a verb:
"To make a complete disaster of something."

Or, for a child, how to give your daughter
an expansive and colourful vocabulary
before the age of six when I learn how
to answer to

whore, and spell my name without the W.

You sir, you made my family
a new home, a fake name, a heritage.

Three generations later, you make me
an activist for sex worker's rights
because if I had a dime for every time
I was called whore

for this name, this skirt, this pair
of boots, this walk home alone

I would be rich.
I would pay my family's way here
six times over.

My passport into this country was an X.
You sir, have left your mark.