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poetry After the Election, I Lose Desire for Men

Anne Champion writes of a woman’s rage upon realizing after a certain election “how much the world/would hate me for being a girl…/how much men could get away with."

After the Election, I Lose Desire for Men

 

By Anne Champion

 

It’s not that I don’t remember what it was like, loving

that swollen muscle, blood filled and aching

 

to plunder my body, a map of borders to invade.

It’s that I can’t stop dreaming

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of planting booby traps in my vagina,

that my IUD morphs into a fossilized jaw

 

of an extinct beast, poised to maul prey,

that my cervix is a spiked impaling pit,

 

that my eyes are red, illuminated, flashing the words

“Emergency” and “Exit.” I want every man

 

that reaches for me to have his fingers severed

by trip wires. I want to decolonize

 

my mind, revert back to the girl I was

before I knew how much the world

 

would hate me for being a girl, before

I knew how much men could get away with,

 

before my whole body transformed,

as those tiny seeds of rage scattered

 

into the arms that used to clutch

the backs of men, praying

 

for some buoyancy, before history

sunk me like an anchor, like it has dragged

 

every woman before me, before I became

a land mine, hidden, dangerous, and

 

ready to go off at the slightest touch.

 

Anne Champion is the author of The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (  Wake Press, 2013), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Crab Orchard Review, Epiphany Magazine, The Pinch, The Greensboro Review, New South, and elsewhere.  She was a 2009 Academy of American Poet’s Prize recipient, a Barbara Deming Memorial grant recipient, a 2015 Best of the Net winner, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She holds degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and an MFA in Poetry from Emerson College.  She currently teaches writing and literature in Boston, MA.