Persephone Visits the Acropolis Museum
ANNE CHAMPION
—Head of a Female Statue, 2nd Century AD.
She carries the look I know well—solemn shock of a woman
who’s seen it all. Below her frozen eyes, two rivulets of mascara.
A museum guide explains that they’re residue from her bronze
eyelashes decaying over centuries. Listen to the ways men deny
the obvious. He doesn’t see her smashed nose, her broken lip?
Even the stones weep to know what it’s like to be shaped by hands,
worshipped by hands & defiled by the same hands you blessed.
Even the stones grieve at the full range of the human experience—
the terror/the awe; the beauty/the ghastly; the resurrection/the desecration;
the stagnation/the transformation; the creation/the destruction.
It’s all captured in her eyes, in the streams of metallic pain inked beneath them.
Her silent brokenness on eternal display, the last gift she bequeaths men.
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.
