Texas women love and curse with a fatal bless your heart. Sun-burned plains enclose them, their multi-colored bodies corralled
in branded jeans. Tender cuts on man-sized platters piled high to heaven with heaping sides of disrespect, they live to be consumed and then discarded
like Porsha Ngumezi. Doctors wouldn’t scrape her womb and she bled out, screaming, young and Black. No charity for her, she left this world in Houston
just like Josseli Barnica, who died while Catholic and brown. The green card in her purse meant life but not liberty because heartbeats from a dying fetus mean a one-way
trip to glory. Nevaeh Crain, pretty white girl with a butterfly tattoo in a sundown town, could tell you that, if sepsis hadn’t starved the pink from all her organs.
Meanwhile hypocrites under Hippocratic oath cull women’s bones to pick their teeth in self-congratulation because in Texas, praise Jesus, the right to life abides.
M. M. Adjarian has published her work in The Baltimore Review, Verdad, South 85, The Missing Slate, Pif Magazine, Gravel, Glint, Grub Street, Crack the Spine, Poetry Flash, and Poetry Quarterly and is currently at work on her first poetry collection and a family memoir titled This Life That Binds. She lives in Austin.
Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
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Now that I’ve quit crying, I’ve shared the link to this poem. OMG, it’s beautiful in a dark and deadly way. Thank you for saying what needs be said, over and over, loud and louder.
Lenora Good