VOWS

Let’s pull at each other’s stitches across our raw,
old wounds, until we have enough thread to bind

our wrists together. Let’s promise to file
each other’s teeth and nails, to feed each other Xanax

when the beasts want to attack. Let’s slaughter
the animals in us, but keep the aliens,

make a home as strange as a UFO,
and then I’ll take you furless, clawless, fangless

and not of this earth—I’ll pledge to love you
until we’re calloused and sore. Let’s vow

to coast for a long time, stop to hover
here or there with momentary grace, hearts flitting

like hummingbirds at feeders, but mostly let’s be
silly children with their pockets full of posies,

or trapeze artists twisting, contorting, and trusting,
or fighter planes taxiing a runway, around and around,

creating cyclones of gusts until nauseous.
Then let’s stop, abrupt as a jerky fair ride.

Tumble away. Dizzy, disoriented, netless.
When it’s over, I swear I’ll take off, fling

myself at the sky until our home shrinks
into a monopoly piece, until the land

becomes a patchwork quilt, until you are no more
than a mere insect, until it all turns to white.









Anne Champion is the author of Reluctant Mistress, a poetry collection released by Gold Wake Press in 2013. She has a BA in Creative Writing and Behavioral Psychology from Western Michigan University and received her MFA in Poetry at Emerson College. Her work appears in Cider Press Review, PANK Magazine, The Aurorean, The Comstock Review, Poetry Quarterly, Line Zero, Thrush Poetry Journal and elsewhere.  She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a Pushcart Prize nominee and a St. Botolph Emerging Writer Grant nominee.  She currently teaches writing and literature in Boston, MA.  http://anne-champion.com