All the Blood Involved in Love by Maya Marshall

Author:Maya Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

Lavender Menace Considers the Lovers in the Photograph

after Teddy and Chris by Preston Gannaway

The men nestle, one inched in to the cleft of his love’s thighs.

They wait under the eye of the sun, in the bull’s eye

of the camera’s lens, as a white witness documents black

love on a late spring day in Chesapeake, Virginia.

One, eyes closed, lips resting against his fellow’s cheekbone.

The other eyes open stares forward soft-browed

as if he’s just opened his eyes;

two moles make a bass clef of the curve of his left eye;

Open exposure in this one frame. Loose clothes betray

a slim collarbone, a meaty bicep, two modest black

bellies sun-coppered and hairy, the slightest catch

in a fold; a clasp on an elbow. The lovers, caught,

lean into each other away from the leaves

in front of the building, hold their spot

on the blacktop of the complex’s parking lot.

Locked as if in bronze.

I have never seen a monument like this:

Durag and chinstrap mustache, brawn-armed

bear with a fresh, tight fade. I’ve lived at the corner

of Confederate and Lincoln, spat on the stone feet

of a gynecological barbarian, seen equestrians

erected high above men’s heads, but never yet two

sleek wide noses or one man’s neck tilted in supplication,

mouth slit open to let the air dart in, hands wound

lightly around a waist and lower back, knuckles alit

on a broad Dockered thigh, two men spun

like blossoming vines shining in the splendor

of two like soldiers in love. In light, not shadow.

But here the woman’s eye has arrested

our fellows in dewy day, without labored sweat or defiant glances,

not off guard or posed but seeming free and seeming

safe in the baleen of each other’s embrace.

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