My Given Name by Maggie Queeney

And there was seen a marvellous brightness in the prison by the keepers.

…

And there appeared an horrible dragon… [I]t is said that he swallowed her in his belly, she making the sign of the cross, and the belly brake asunder and so she issued out all whole and sound.

—“Saint Margaret,” The Golden Legend, Caxton Edition, 1483

Here I am, telling myself the story

Of myself again. The mammal of me, 

Lowing my lone note,

Grit both the middle and the start of it:

A bit of sand or shell shard, the hard

Speck of stone or flint or bone or beak—

What cannot be broken back 

Into nothing, but offers an ever

Smaller division: this is what made me 

What I am: Mar—as in mark, as in wound, 

As in sea. As the root word pearl at the center

Of me: damage and flaw. I freak iridescent, 

Cultured or wild. My pet forms: Magpie, 

Then Maggot. Magnificent, imprisoned dirt

Magnified to trapdoor, magnet of hurt,

My sputtering beauty. Bowing to the ground,

I listen to the rush inside my body, hush of gas,

Blooms of blue petals ringing the jet, as nerves

Singing their leviathans’ sibilant songs deep

In the ocean of me. I ward and seal and cover.

I swallow. I round into a swelling nacre

Moon, the only gemstone bred out of a living

Creature. Or the woman reborn whole, limbs

Spilling out of the dragon’s belly, the scales,

Meat and fat parted and heavy as the velvet 

Curtains framing the spotlight, the beam

Of hot gold gracing the tramp of me. The rough

Labor of me, my midwife. My insane, my orphaned,

My born homeless. I spiral my shelter, my own

Shell of bone. My reptile mother formed over

My body a bell that gleams and refuses to ring:

Tongued into a stone shard licked harmless,

Hearted in an arrowhead fitted to a pin.

The skin grown through the armor.

The fur grown over the scar of the collar.

Maggie Queeney is the author of settler, selected by Shane McCrae in the Baltic Writing Residency Poetry Chapbook Contest. Recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, The Ruth Stone Scholarship, and an IAP Grant from the City of Chicago, her recent work is found in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, and The North American Review. She reads and writes in Chicago.