Anne Champion

How Capitalism Dreams

It dreams of knives unzipping torsos
and finding the truth: some men aren’t made of flesh,
crumpled dollars clogging arteries, dirty and manhandled.

It dreams of fire that looks veined: it knows
that destruction is the most human thing of all.
It has nightmares of people who speak and sparks

flare from their mouths, of private jets crashing
into mansions, of waking to a home coated
in so much dust that no maid can make it shine,

of foreign tongues that turn to divining rods
and point accusatorially wherever it goes, of stray dogs
with voices, of spells that resurrect the murdered,

of rusted tanks, of prison bars melting, of suffering
that turns land into a rash, of songs that claw
at walls like an infestation, of children

reading books about heroes who learn
how to rescue themselves, of skin
that’s not as white as snow.

---

What is Trying to Kill You

The wastelands where no serotonin flourishes
in your brain. The dams that your body builds
in your arteries out of trans fat and refined sugar.
Your inability to solve the equations of investments
and retirement savings. Snorting the ancestry
of corporations. Economies that subsist
on blood. Fleeing a home you love, chased
off by rising rent. Politicians who play
fetch with human bones and gnaw
on them on their down time. Maybe the man
that follows you off the bus has a gun.
Maybe he has fangs and that hunger that afflicts
only beasts and men. Sometimes you say
you’re hunted and no one believes you.
Sometimes you tell no one you’re eroding.
The tasers you watch chomping on black torsos
corrode your tenuous faith in justice.
Sometimes you fantasize about social change,
but an aerial video of the protest you marched
reveals that you look like vermin that have overrun
something abandoned. You never enter
an airport security machine without imagining
what it would feel like for your plane to crash
into a high rise. Gods with penises
that mansplain from holy books that men
kept revising, so that your muted body would cave
in on itself obediently and worship.
The prayer beads you bind your wrists
with, the talismans you’ve rubbed into fray.
Your poorly seamed anxiety, your legacy of melancholy,
your stockpile of genetic diseases. Memories
you can’t conjure anymore. You’re waiting
for the winds to gather their forces
and invade your shores. Rising sea levels,
holes in the ozone layer, melting polar ice caps,
climate change, human destruction so senseless
that it can only be gawked at. Words that evade
truth. Truths that evade voices. The refugee crisis
of your fingers that reach out as open palms
when they need to be fists to feel safe.




--
Anne Champion is the author of The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), 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 an 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.