The O’Brien in My Name
By Ed O’Casey
Poetry Prize winner
Ciudad Obregón and its pale
presidente namesake echoes
of my bloodmix at the Gulf
of California. to get there
cross biting desert and minacious
zero tolerance. long self-defined
by my Irish propensity
for drink: an ill-fitted
tunic. almost dead but still
that blood in me, the same
will: Minnesota O’Brien tucked
into the envelope of Casey,
Lara crimped also into that parcel:
bloodlines in competition.
the tendency to define myself
by what people call me: O’Casey
the sum of marriage —my skin in winter Irish,
in summer pushing at the boundary of “Mexican”.
to define myself as either betrays in both
something integral. Irish deserted
into Mexico, O’Brien
evolved into Obregón:
the Irish enveloped in the Mexican,
shamrocks hanging
in candy skull windows,
prayer flags in lines stretched,
the rhythm of trumpet
and fiddle—grito: a debt
in the name of
expulsion, in the name
of Catholic, in the name of O.