Maya Marshall

Portrait in the Lone Star[1]

Sometimes two women meet and smile for no one else.
 
I’ve looked into the open and watched
the month’s first rivulet descend, as she called
on my tongue’s continued praise.
 
In the world, outside of plush duvets and soft bedfellows,
men with knives call the tide of blood from daughters.
 
I don’t know what I would do
if a man looked like my daddy hated me,
hated my sex all the more because I did not want him
to have it, or because I have wanted a woman too--
 
wanted to roll a body out of, unclasp the straps.
What if the only time a black man loves me is when I’m dressing his wounds?
 
Or, on a given day, I prefer the sweet humidity of a lipsticked breath,
the ice trail on a summer belly?
 
Somewhere in Texas two women lay together openly in bayou humidity,
croon in the lovers’ spit.
 
Later, one woman’s father unclasped the straps, rolled the bodies
out of a red Kia. Did she ever call him daddy?
 
Was it like the first time he held her?
 
Those bodies near the dumpster, faces facing or turned.
Imagine the lovers’ last acts were defiant, protective.
The women battered, him, a door to break through.

[1]James Cosby, 46, bludgeoned his daughter Britney Cosby to death and shot her lover, Crystal Jackson, on March 6 before dumping the bodies near the ferry gate in Port Bolivar, Texas, police believe.
 https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/dad-killed-daughter-lesbian-lover-gay-mom-article-1.1722103

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Maya Marshall is an editor and a poet. She is co-founder of underbelly. Marshall, a Callaloo fellow and a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, serves as a manuscript editor for Haymarket Books. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2019, RHINO, Blackbird, and eslewhere.