Planchette Captcha ✔︎ “I’m not apocryphal”

“He lived with a wife, a fellow slave whose name in Greek would have been Kyno, or bitch, but it was Spako in the Median language, for the Medes call a kyno a spako.” 

— Herodotus, translated by Andrea L. Purvis

I mean, imagine your name got mediated

and modified; commodified; de-Mede-ified:

Herodotus spelled it “Spako”  

(but that’s my letters—not his, not yours)

and only after glossing it over with “Kyno.”

Now Purvis puts you down as “bitch.”

Imagine people thinking your name meant

           and so could be exchanged for 

                        something no one ever called you.

Imagine that, come all these thousands years

and miles to haunt some stupid shitty teens 

in these the dog days of their horror movie summer, 

and you don’t even know what shape to trace on the Ouija board.

Name only legible as insult anymore, “bitch” a ship 

gone Argo several times over

            since it first seemed yours,

a name                                                maybe only ever legible 

as insult anyway.                    But it’s whatever. Since

all these goons have got their grubby little paws

already all over         the only medium

          you have left

to speak with               (Tongue long gone dust again.

anyway.                         Or never even up from dust.)

            Might as well

                          spit the name 

we gave back

into our smug little faces.

Or maybe she could make the loss

of however she was actually 

called into something like her

                                                     stillborn son

from whom her love 

                                    displaced

made Cyrus great. But then I guess Cyrus left her too later on,

and she did not name him Cyrus, but something else we also lost.