Anne Champion
Time
A student mentioned that if we could space travel 100,000 light years
and look back at earth, we’d see dinosaurs: that’s how long it’d take
for the light to reach back. Just as stars are merely memories of the universe—
suns long dead whose light is only now pinpricking us. Just then,
all time collapsed, as I realized that from a certain distance in space,
you’re always raping me, always taking a crow bar to my door, always
standing over my bed, and I’m always incapacitated, as vulnerable as a baby.
I wonder if time can collapse in the opposite direction too—
if from some distance in space, we’re already dead.
Is this why I felt that surge of recognition, as if I’d known you always,
as if something inside of you was dying, as if I could re-animate your corpse
by feeding myself to the zombie? Is this why I still think of you daily,
why the emotions wax and wane as consistent as the moon, as if you were
my destiny—the darkness that comes to swallow the star’s last gasp of light?
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), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). 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, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.
Return to July 2023 Edition
A student mentioned that if we could space travel 100,000 light years
and look back at earth, we’d see dinosaurs: that’s how long it’d take
for the light to reach back. Just as stars are merely memories of the universe—
suns long dead whose light is only now pinpricking us. Just then,
all time collapsed, as I realized that from a certain distance in space,
you’re always raping me, always taking a crow bar to my door, always
standing over my bed, and I’m always incapacitated, as vulnerable as a baby.
I wonder if time can collapse in the opposite direction too—
if from some distance in space, we’re already dead.
Is this why I felt that surge of recognition, as if I’d known you always,
as if something inside of you was dying, as if I could re-animate your corpse
by feeding myself to the zombie? Is this why I still think of you daily,
why the emotions wax and wane as consistent as the moon, as if you were
my destiny—the darkness that comes to swallow the star’s last gasp of light?
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), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). 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, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient.
Return to July 2023 Edition