Anne Champion
Persephone's Gambling Habit
In Spring, I get to feeling lucky. I text Tyche & tell her
I’m betting on the number 13 again. What others
consider omen, I consider fortune. There are 13 full moons.
Judas was the 13th attendee at the Last Supper. In Norse mythology,
the trickster Loki arrived as the 13th dinner guest of the gods
& brought chaos as his housewarming gift. These poems aren’t sonnets
because I didn’t walk love’s threshold. In numerology, 13 means death,
& death is the realm I reign; the man I sleep with brings me oblivion
every time he touches me. Ancient lunar calendars had a hidden 13th
month, belonging to the underworld, symbolic of lost time. Temples
avoided 13 because it evoked my presence. They pray to transform
from calling out to god to becoming god. Listen to me:
if you add one & three, you get the number of transformation.
Persephone Gives a Motivational Speech to the Caryatids
Maidens, mothers, & crones: I need you to understand this:
the punishment of women was pure myth. You’re not meant to uphold
the weight of their temples; your wombs aren’t their missionaries.
You aren’t supposed to be ageless, your humiliation forever on display.
It’s their audacities that should be cast in stone—not your bodies, not your souls.
I’ll tell you the wisdom of the underworld: we’re meant to be blooming things.
Why do you think Hades snatched me from the daffodil I’d plucked?
He didn’t want me to see myself in it. Someday, you’ll realize freedom
is something you can just take: walk off their foundations, let their ceilings crumble.
Refuse to turn your suffering to stone: amplify joy, become a prism for sunlight, filter
into rainbow. Keep the marble nose they chiseled off you, a symbol of your breath
they feared. Give offerings to the ghost of the frozen girl you once were.
Peace arrives after the devastation of truth. Whole wildflower fields will bloom inside.
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). 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.