Delia Tramontina
Alphabetical Order
This is not my name. There's a mermaid with amnesia, there's a woman in an art gallery, sipping Chardonnay, using her hands as she talks. Her name is Jane and she doesn't know why.
My father said, 'There's no fucking way we're naming her Donna.'
There were no hurricanes that year, except mine, and it was only a drizzle, not like the braided rivers of rainwater that collects where our driveway meets the asphalt; too much for the sewer to swallow. Judging my name is like having an opinion about the daily ritual of breathing.
I am invisible.
The Italian call me 'little sunset'. My family was jealous of my light skin and eyes. They like the Arians; they want blonde Friulani shepherd boys with freckles.
I don't know where Jane's family is from. The mermaid is in a rain puddle in Flushing, New York. She doesn't know what a hurricane is and I wonder if the earthquakes rattle the ocean too. Neither one of us reads many newspapers these days. My father said 'The baby was fat and ugly and flailing in her own shit.' They still call her Donna even though her hygiene has improved.
I was never sure of my syllables.
My mother says we were cute babies because we didn't look like monkeys. Jane probably did though; I never said she was beautiful, just that she sips wine in Manhattan galleries, that they expect her when they meet me. I could be olive, full featured, not burning in the sun; exotic, southern. Only e conoscenti can tell where I come from; that I never touched my own feces; I am not a hurricane or a mermaid with a name out of a newspaper. I am a little light, a little sunset. Maybe I throw the earth of its axis, but I don't think so.