Puberty

by | Jul 7, 2021 | Poetry

Lust set me off like wide hips bobbing
on the back of a bad boy’s motorcycle.

I can’t tell you when I first knew, but at some point
the idea of being a wild girl clinging

to a bad boy’s electric-fenced heart
and barbed-wire biceps set a wet whistle humming

through my center. Once, the boy down the street
said we should share our secrets. He showed me

burn marks on his arms. I showed him how
to take a bra off without taking off

a shirt; I shimmied it out of my sleeve
and dangled it out the window—gravity

plucked it from my fingers like a prompt butler
and then pulled both of us to the floor.

I’m a broken girl I go with the broken boys, I thought.
I’m a broken doll I go with the broken toys.

 

PUBERTY by Anne Champion

 


 

Photo used under CC. 

About The Author

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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, 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.