When dating, I’d love to watch my partner
drop her credit card from her tanned hands
and attract the male Spanish-speaking servers.

She’d get frustrated they skipped her
Hawaiian name’s too-many successive vowels.
She’d adjust her inherited Hawaiian jewelry,

declaring her identity and anger at them
for jumping to connection with her Spanish last name
and not knowing Pelayo is Spanish from the Philippines.

Oh the struggle of mixed-race names
the ones that have stories behind them,
stories that are never read.

I loved her frustration, that impotence
you feel at being unheard but loved.
Love that makes it impossible to complain.

When we married, she took my last name,
hyphenated ethnicity and confusion.
With the added punctuation, she became

less of an individual
more connected to me.

– Christian Hanz Lozada