PERSEPHONE DISCUSSES OTHER ROYALTY

People say it could’ve been worse. You could’ve never resurrected
from that cave in Eleusis. This always makes me cry.
You don’t understand, they say. Let me tell you the story
of the king who severed the heads off every queen he impregnated.
Let me tell you the story of the king with a mistress whose queen died
being chased by people hungry to consume her loneliness. At least
he wasn’t like your father, they say. You don’t understand, I say.
You think Hades gave me a crown? You think he was loyal to me?
I wasn’t the type of woman who could escape but willingly returned to a tyrant.
I didn’t become queen because some man could put his hands on me
without consequences. I didn’t marry a wolf and passively watch him feed
on our children and other prey. Do you realize what I had to kill inside of me
to become his queen? I extracted my own heart with his forked spear. I fed it to him.

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.