All the Blood Involved in Love

Maya Marshall

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781642597226
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Marshall's poems traverse familial mythography to investigate contemporary politics, Blackness, reproductive justice, and the stakes of race and interracial partnership, queerness, and love. With an unflinching seriousness she interrogates womanhood, meditates on race and queerness, and considers the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child.

For Dawn Wooten

I have the good fortune to be free:

to choose,

to have part of my cervix intact,

to change the locks after

I’m attacked.

Somebody offered me a karate class.

I could still, with a little more

of the luck I’ve already enjoyed,

say yes to a man—

to a little sugar.

Nobody has a life without a woman’s blood.

I could still go under and come out whole

enough to make

another whole life—

a child to place to my mother’s bosom—

Oh, to be free

enough to pick apart a rapist

man-in-charge, or

a god-doctor

with some script for all the reasons

he knows life is his enough to give

or take

like a kiss, or a breath.

Like a wave: to drown, uncover, or cover up.

An Abortion Ban

is a body snatcher,

is an ethnic cleansing.

The uterus is a cave,

is an incubator, is a vault,

is a self-destructing bomb,

is a thoroughfare.

Semen is an innocent bystander.

Penises are just boys being.

A woman is a vestibule.

A judge is a strict father,

is Joseph awed by his father’s creation,

is Joseph relieved of fault,

is Joseph saving face.

A woman is a support beam.

A girl is a receptacle.

A fetus without lungs is an unlucky horseshoe.

A fetus in a homeless woman is an empty pillowcase.

An embryo is a fingernail.

A fetus is a jail.

A woman who miscarries is a quarterback—

executed. Point blank.

A woman with a felony is insulation.

An angry man with a staircase is a felony-maker.

A livebirth with a dead mother is a school lunch.

A stillbirth is a twenty-thousand-dollar bill.

A pregnant black woman is a dead black woman.

A black woman who miscarries is a dead crow.

A state legislature is a vulture.

A choice is a liability.

A Planned Parenthood is a desert.

A Planned Parenthood is an oasis.

A woman is a treasure chest.

A woman is a former voter.

A uterus is a leash.

A stillbirth is a tether.

A thirteen-year-old is a child. Only that.

A woman is a bloom.

A seed is an explosive.

Fertilizer is a shackle.

A woman is a target.

A uterus is a target.

A felon is a target.

Self-Portrait as an Atlas Moth at the Bar

The boys get mad: Tease.

I’m shameless.

I dance to sweat, rustle

every scale on my wings.

I use the moon to navigate

the night, follow flashes,

lit specks, neon for my flight.

I came to fill up

my lungs, fill up my blood,

fill up my head with night noise.

Anatomy of a Fish Hook

… how can I defend myself against what I want?

—Henri Cole

I fix my mouth to gather you

as our-other-selves stand in a doorway

eyeing us; inside—here—is a flurry of embers.

My touch amuses you—

down, up; hard, quiet. “I’m close,” you whisper.

I palm your knee, stroke your throat,

and you remain whole as a mercy—

you are unequaled restraint—only the briefest flinch—

my lip slightly confused by the surfeit:

salt, water, muscle, saliva, fructose.

Ask yourself, are you sadder here outside

your alliances, weaning me from your thigh

(Clung on in a soulless coming), fear sprinkling

poison around you (Somebody near),

than when—with a king’s ransom, a tongue,

paradise—you could hide your life, divide

it from a household peopled with closed mouths,

my barb fixed to your porous pink?

The Field of Blood

In the hospital, the man I love

lowers his eyes. Catheter. Cotton.

I join his mother for a walk.

If I were your mother,

I’d tell you not to marry him.

My own mother says

I can’t stay with a sick man.

You want to fi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• I
• II
• III
• Acknowledgments
• Gratitude
• Notes
• Back Cover