My name is Portego Tuma and lots of the time Portric can be seen as an abstract art.

But often I think a poet is trying to say something about I am.

Trying to speak of the dignity and the power of their own life and that they're using that

powerful word I and locating it in the poem to say something that's true for them and

because of that it's true for many.

Say my name by Malek Gisa Fattafahi.

My name was my name before I walked among the living, before I could breathe, before

I had lungs to fill, before my great grandmother passed and everyone was left to grieve.

My name was birthed from a dream, a whisper from gods to a king, a shout into the stars

that produced another that shan as bright.

They held me without being burnt, humming lullabies in pigeon.

My name was passed down from my ancestors, they acknowledged my roots grew in two places

so they ripped my name from the ocean and mixed it into the bloodlines of my totems.

My name has survived the destruction of worlds and the genocidal rebirthing of so-called

ones.

It's escaped the overwhelmed jaw of the deathbringer many a time.

It has survived the conflicts that resulted in my gods from both lands knowing me as

kin but noticing that I am painfully unrecognizable and lost.

They are incapable of understanding the foreign tongue that was forced on me.

My name has escaped cyclones and their daughters.

It has been blessed by the dead as they mixed dirt, salt and liquid red into my flesh.

My name is the definition of resilience.

...