Marianne Tefft is a poet, lyricist, Montessori teacher and voiceover reader on the Dutch Caribbean island of Sint Maarten. Her poems appear in Where I See the Sun (House of Nehesi, 2013) and Captured by Corona (Beyond Kultura, 2020) and many online anthologies, including Open Skies Poetry, The Stars & the Moon in the Evening Sky and Scarlet Dragonfly Journal. In the coming months, her work is to appear in Zooanthology (Sweetycat Press), Panoplyzine and Syncopation. You can listen as she reads her work on YouTube (Marianne Tefft) and find her on Facebook (Marianne Tefft – Poet & Wordsmith). Her first poetry collection is Full Moon Fire (Tellwell Talent, 2022). 

Never Forget

You begged me 
To tattoo your name
Across my heart
So I would never forget you
When I refused
With one stroke
Across my throat
You etched your rage
Into that same heart 
Hands thighs and ankles
You left me 
Disfigured morsel of flesh
To the pit bulls
Behind the morgue
Where my rust-red fingers 
Splayed your name
Across the door of a hearse
You thought bore my initials
So they would not forget you
You drove my car
Across the border
While my knees and elbows frayed
As they ground against asphalt
Strewn with once-sequined dreams
To the hospital
Across the grassy median
So you will never forget
The morning I
Your daughter’s mother
Refused to die

God’s Will

They were surely God’s will
Those champagne afternoons in beds of roses
Whose flattened petals now tumble
From the pages of Ferlinghetti
I had never been a believer
But she whose name translates precisely
Made me entertain the foreign notion 
Of divine intervention 
With long brown hair that strove toward her waist
Long dark lashes that grazed my skin so gratefully
Undeterred perhaps inspired 
By our initial lack of a mutual tongue
Her long browned legs
Embraced her American Dream
And not a word was lost in translation