Baby Demerol Gets Set Adrift
As I kicked, punched, and swam in amniotic fluid
The nurse asked my mother, do you need Demerol?
First child, extra-long labor, pain—yes, YES! All this shit?
It’d better be a boy. She calmed; her brain broke for lunch
But delusions confused and muddled her name quest
At Big G, Boyle Heights, 1951.
Rayon reminded her of fabric; Kingsford sounded
Like charcoal. It’d better be a boy. Girls are
So, so—Nameless for months, she summoned Ronnie
From the depths of a movie memory.
Ronnie
Is leaf blade-shaped, leafstalk, stipules, photosynthesis,
Maybe a Hebrew joy or future Scottish king.
Dowell is Irish for son of the dark stranger,
Perhaps a slave master’s nanny and concubine.
There’s no Congo, Bantu, or Cameroon Ronnies,
Some Kofis.
Dowells populate Tennessee.
My name is to die for, bless my soul. Mother’s joy.
My name is Watts, like Towers. My name is Compton,
Like troubled. My name is Palm Lane Public Housing
Fused to explode on the border between the two.|
Lee, my middle name, asked the first and last
How in hell did I get stuck between two fuck ups?
People always mispronounce Dowell—Do well—Dial
Doughwell——never Ronald, once Ronnie, I’m now Ron,
which sounds sexy when murmured or whispered naked.
Lil Black, RD, Red Devil, and Ron-Ron; better
Nicknames than Pootchie, Hickey, Spot, Skillet, or boy.
Ron renamed—reinvented, and evolutionary.
Ron L. Dowell floats like a verse in cyberspace.
Ron L. Dowell wrote Watts UpRise, a poetry collection released by World Stage Press in 2022. A very public love letter to Watts, Los Angeles, the collection honors its most notable artistic landmark, the Watts Towers, and its creator, Sabato Rodia. Watts UpRise is a finalist for the 2022 Press 53 Award for Poetry, and a featured poem, “Compton, An Energy-Fueled Dark Star,” was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. Ron’s poetry resides in Penumbra, Writers Resist, Oyster Rivers Pages, North Dakota Quarterly, The Wax Paper, Kallisto Gaia Press, The Penmen Review, Packingtown Review-Journal, and The Poeming Pigeon.
