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On Becoming a Country Music Song

Jenny Yang Cropp

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That first night, I traced invisible letters 

in the shower, water carving

their song into my skin. A mother-no-mother girl

could have a new mother if only she changed 

her middle name to Lynn.

L – Y – N – N. Jenny Lynn, Jenny Lynn.

Like a girl I had fallen in love with, I wrote her 

name with hearts everywhere I went,

watched it appear on windows and evaporate,

hummed it in the kitchen, hid it in the Hello Kitty journal 

my there-but-not-there mother gifted me

along with this middle name no one else could say,

or teach me to say, and so why not give it up? 

Jenny Lynn, Jenny Lynn. I tried to imagine 

this girl whose name I might belong to

if I checked yes at the bottom of the love note 

tucked in my palm. This girl whose mother’s lips 

barely had to open for people to hear her,

her name a flick of tongue at the back 

of the teeth, even in anger

how easy to speak it and watch it spoken,

to move the air from her throat and carry it forward. 

That girl would love church and men and babies 

and me. Her hair would curl

on the first try, and what a voice they’d say.

She wouldn’t have to disappear

in the long pause before her calling.

I didn’t know then that the name my mother gave

to me was a bridge, the lineage a tree

to climb from Yang to Ko to Bu, all family,

that my Namwon Yang mother,

my appearing-sometimes-in-dreams mother, 

would try to explain one day, if I let her.

I didn’t know the weight of names 

was its own sad song

about memory and loss—a mouth opening,

the yawn and catch, back of the tongue 

between the uvula and the root 

redirecting air out through the nose—

that even if I couldn’t hear it yet, 

I could feel how it might sound 

if I let myself sing it one day.

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Playlist song: Patsy Cline, “Walkin’ After Midnight”

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Jenny Yang Cropp an associate professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University and the author of the poetry collection String Theory, a 2016 Oklahoma Book Award finalist, as well as two chapbooks. She serves as the poetry editor for the literary journal Big Muddy and as the Southwest Council Chair for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She holds an MFA from Minnesota State University-Mankato and a PhD from the University of South Dakota.

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