by Anne Champion
In East Texas, the vultures’ hunchback stare, starving
and relentless, pierces you like a beak to the gut,
as if they know something you don’t. They circle in flight,
stalk from telephone poles, glare in a way that accuses:
Don’t you know you’re already dead? It’s what your stalker smelled—
the decomposition of the girl your parents killed.
When he swooped and fed, you knew the truth of yourself:
that you’ve wandered this earth as an orphaned ghost child
searching for the parents who killed you, eager to be enfolded
into the black wings of beasts. Daily, you rise
from your grave and stumble obliviously along the same path.
You show your wounds to the living, and they recoil, urge
you to walk towards the light. The concrete burns.
You swat off flies. A hungry man waits.
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.
Hawaii Pacific Review 