By Cristi Donoso Best

I

Sometimes a girl walks down the street and she’s wearing a little skirt or something. Qué chulla. Someone will whisper that. And the ll will be rough, like too many zh, zh, zhs in a row. And then you’ll be at home, sitting on your mother’s bed folding laundry, rolling socks into each other, lining up the feet just so. And there’ll be one sock left over. You’ll look in the basket, under your own body. No, it’s alone, unclaimed. And your mother will say, Dame esa chulla. She’ll take it from you and throw it over the side of the bed, with the rags. You won’t need to ask what chulla means, after that.

II

After you leave Quito, no one outside your house will call you Titi for years. Even inside, you’ll begin to be known by your new, assumed name. You’ll forget, sometimes, that you were ever called anything else. You will struggle with your new names, play with the spelling a bit. You won’t know it but you’ll be looking to carve some of the sounds away, trying to inch towards those two syllables that never stop quietly ringing inside you. One day, your brother will have a son. You’ll look into the baby’s fuzzy face, his brand-new eyes. And your brother will say to him, this is Titi. You will never give up your name again.

Cristi Donoso Best is an Ecuadorian-American writer and MFA candidate at American University. She will serve as the poetry editor for Folio Literary Journal for 2020 – 2021. Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Entropy, and others. Originally from Quito, she lives outside Washington, DC. You can find more of her work at cristidonoso.com.