Poetry / Anne Champion 

 

:: Persephone Thinks Love is a Parasite ::

These women call on me with garnets and pomegranate seeds 
& ask me to stitch up their broken hearts maimed by some man, 
but their affliction is much more serious than a tear to the muscle of love. 
The man is really a tumor, cutting off their blood supply until they transform 
into ghosts of their former selves. I rip off their rose-colored glasses, crush 
the lenses under my heel. You don’t have the love of a man; 
you don’t even have lust for a beast. If you cut that man open, maggots 
which have cleaned out his soul will worm out and attach 
themselves to your brain. They find delusions of love like yours 
most delicious—they’ll reproduce inside of you faster than rabbits 
until you’re just a husk, as frail and empty as the cicadas 
that litter the ground after they split the silence of an afternoon 
with their symphonies of despair; as frail and empty as the promises 
he made to you, another victim to the pandemic of his pain. 

:: Persephone Celebrates Her Anniversary ::

Hades doesn’t get me anything on our anniversary— 
he tells himself that he already gave me a world. 
Rituals to mark my militant march towards eternity 
are attended by me alone. This year, I want new bones 
to adorn my throne. Hades keeps a pit of men trapped 
in tar: the ones who murdered their wives and kids. I visit 
and stare into the sea of gaping faces, croaking misery 
like a swamp of toads. I pluck one up by the hair 
and hack my scythe to his neck like a stalk of sugarcane. 
I hold his stunned face in my hands, imagine his mother, 
palms on each cheek, asking him his dreams. He said 
he’d be a hero, but in reality he’d be a monster. 
Today his skull becomes a footrest. My marriage 
was never proposed as a question; 
if it had been, this would’ve been my answer. 

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

I woke grog­gi­ly, dis­ori­ent­ed. Why was I on my back when I sleep on my stom­ach? Why were my breasts out of my bra? Why was there extreme pain in my gen­i­tals? I looked down and gasped: a stain of blood and feces pooled between my legs. “Oh my God, I’m dead,” was my first thought. My sec­ond thought was one of pure despair: “My friend was the one to kill me.” 

Three years ago, this trau­ma became my real­i­ty to heft for the rest of my days: the dis­cov­ery that my apart­ment main­te­nance man had been stalk­ing me for months hit me like a tsuna­mi turns a whole land­scape into ruins. He’d put GHB in my Bri­ta while I was at work, and he’d bro­ken into my home at night with a crow bar to my screen door. Wak­ing up from the first assault was only the begin­ning: he’d go on to drug and assault me for sev­er­al weeks before I escaped. 

It’s no exag­ger­a­tion to say that a part of me didn’t sur­vive that event: the last bits of my naivety had to die com­plete­ly; I had to walk through the world heav­ing a new and bru­tal wis­dom of pain, both my own and my stalker’s. It was a jour­ney to the under­world and back, and, as such, was fraught with com­plex emo­tions, includ­ing bouts of denial, sui­ci­dal ideation, grief, and Stock­holm syn­drome. 

But in that har­row­ing expe­ri­ence, I learned more about my own men­tal health, my autism, and my capa­bil­i­ties for com­pas­sion towards oth­ers, even those with the dark­est patholo­gies. As I healed for sev­er­al years through intense trau­ma ther­a­py and edu­ca­tion, I returned to the land of the liv­ing with a wis­dom of dark­ness like Perse­phone walk­ing through the spring blooms with her mem­o­ries of Hades. 

There­fore, my cur­rent poet­ry project is called Love Let­ters to Hades, in which I explore the mul­ti­fac­eted feel­ings of sur­vivors who endure mul­ti­ple assaults and Stock­holm syn­drome through the voice of the god­dess of ghosts. 

Anne Cham­pi­on is the author of She Saints & Holy Pro­fan­i­ties (Quar­ter­ly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Lev­i­ta­tions (Trem­bling Pil­low Press, 2019), Reluc­tant Mis­tress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), The Dark Length Home (Noc­tu­ary Press, 2017), Hunt­ed Car­rion: Son­nets to a Stalk­er (Bowk­er, 2024), and This is a Sto­ry About Ghosts: A Mem­oir of Bor­der­line Per­son­al­i­ty Dis­or­der (Bowk­er, 2024). Her work appears in Verse Dai­ly, diode, Tupe­lo Quar­ter­ly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Sala­man­der, New South, Redi­vider, PANK Mag­a­zine, and else­where. She was a 2009 Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Prize recip­i­ent, a 2016 Best of the Net win­ner, a Dou­glas Pre­ston Trav­el Grant recip­i­ent, and a Bar­bara Dem­ing Memo­r­i­al Grant recip­i­ent. She received her MFA in poet­ry from Emer­son Col­lege.