M.M. Adjarian

Self-Congratulation

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.