Portside

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

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.