Current
Issue
Volume 12.1
Michelle Ott
—
Upon Arriving in Prague, May 2018
The man at the front desk of the kolej asks me:
“Are you German?”
He holds my student ID in his right hand
and my surname in his teeth,
harsh, staccato t’s curled
around his Czech tongue like a cousin.
He peers through the plexiglass
at mein goldenes Haar
and his lips press together
to nearly call me Margarete.
Ʋmafo, does he know we are not extinct?
That an ocean away, we survive
on fry bread and promised dust?
Ʋmafo—I have no other name
by which to call you—this name is mine
as much as it was yours, as foreign
to me as this Bohemian dirt,
as the voice box on the tram calling
out names I cannot contort my mouth
to pronounce. I’m sorry, I’m sorry; I know
I am not the survival you prayed for.
Your diluted daughter, the quantum of my blood
drips, trips over the threshold, trails tears
down your wrinkled cheek. I am all that is left
of you, the last;
the granddaughter of a half-breed
son stolen and shaped from the red earth
into a man, delivered to Christ
like the winning show pig at the Oklahoma State Fair.
I carry this oinking shame as my inheritance.
I know that I am not enough
to ask for anything more.
The man smiles at me, expecting.
“No,” I answer,
“I am American.” I am—
technically—not lying.
Michelle Ott is a lesbian poet and writer from the Mid-Atlantic and an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She earned her MFA in creative writing from American University in 2023, where she served as a contributing writer for the university's MFA student-run blog, CafeMFA. Her poetry has been featured in BOOTH Magazine, The Mid-Atlantic Review, The Talon Review, and Impostor: A Poetry Journal, among others, and was nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net award. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.
