I’m so American I close my ports
of nourishment with a bit of bread
a bourbon, a burrito bowl, a nipple
a penis. I take in and in like oceans,
our landfills. My belly and arms swell,
striate like felled logs. Consider
the common inclination to love
into submission: “hush, baby.”
I do this for myself when I masturbate
to fall asleep. I have been a woman
for some time now, a uterine cavern,
an acute sense of danger. I want
to be a mother unlike my own,
and I am ashamed to think I think
so little of her
resilience, her desperate love of me
I do not want to bear a child,
because I do not want to feel
never alone. I’m so American I dream
of children discarded.
What happens to a child detained?
How many can I be a home to?
Cover Art by Stephanie Broussard
Maya Marshall is a writer and an editor. Author of the chapbook, Secondhand (Dancing Girl Press, 2016), she is also co-founder of underbellymag.com, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. Marshall has earned fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, Cave Canem, and the Community of Writers. She works as a manuscript editor for Haymarket Books and has served as a senior editor for [PANK]. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2019 (University of Virginia Press), RHINO, Potomac Review, Blackbird, the Volta, and
elsewhere.
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