After the Election, I Lose Desire for Men
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.