Self-Congratulation
By M. M. Adjarian
Texas women love and curse with fatal bless your hearts. 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 been published in such journals as the Baltimore Review, Verdad, South 85, Grub Street, The Ekphrastic Review, Eclectica, Crack the Spine, Across the Margin, The Courtship of Winds and North Dakota Quarterly. She is currently working on a collection of semi-autobiographical poems based in the Major Arcana of the tarot, and she lives in Austin.
Photo by Matt Brown via a Creative Commons license.
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