Before I Could Tell a Man I Was Raped

Before he was this man, before he’d disarmed the landmines
hidden in his muscled flesh, he was a torpedo-bodied
teenage boy, imprisoned. Before the death penalty, he clenched the keys

of his Baptist youth minister, given to him, like all things given
to him, in exchange for something bodily. Before he broke
into that house, his minister had taken him, a boy/a bullet,

inside himself, a man/a pistol. Before that man did the things
that mummified the boy’s tongue, the boy
needed what all boys need: the free-falling leap

into fear, which we call love, which we know
to have its invisible trapdoors. Before the minister became
a minister, before he preyed on children, he knew

that love can be a synonym for indoctrination, is its own hallucinatory
religion: before, he’d named his body Christ-like
and watched the boys put out their tongues to receive.

Before the judge’s gavel, the jury-chant, the echo of guilty,
the boy watched as another teenage boy he knew axed
the air: the pedophile’s blood splattered his life into before/after.

Before the coldness of bars, the coldness of handcuffs,
there was a colder coldness in the loudness of lynch mobs.
Before the death sentence comes the life’s sentences:

those truths slithering between the years, hissing their warnings
to penetrate open wounds, only protected by the thinnest new skin.
Before he accepted his fate, he wore his pain around his neck

like an anchor. Before he learned the laws of prison,
he already knew the dangers of speaking ill of powerful
men. Before the murder, the boy was silent, and after, the boy became

a man who was silent, and in between all those silences,
the threads of wounds wove their tapestry of destiny—
that cocoon, that binding force into the Houdini-shift,

that magical wriggle to winged-thing. But before he survived,
he had to learn the comfort of a reliable pain: he had to
lengthen his anchor’s chain, to choke on the words, yes, it happened,

like a boy who swallowed the wishbone instead of snapping it:
everyone knows that the boy who holds the largest piece
of his skeleton in tact will have all his dreams come true.

Before he finally spoke, there was me, begging brutal men to vomit
their language into a clear bile, to see my warped-self
reflected back. Before I knew his story, I tempted

any man to open his mouth—let me smell my desire
on a his breath, before those teeth take me
into their spiritual cage, before I settle into a beast’s belly

I can’t burn my way out of. Before the after, who was I?
After the before, my tongue wore armor and my spine
was billows of smoke. Before, I was a girl who called out

to the moon by name. After, I was a girl that moonwalked
on ash and dust. Before I knew this man, I watched hurt men
the way shards watch each other, impossibly multiplied

in every direction, untouchable in our needle-like stings.
Before I wrote him, the thought to speak floated
over me like the shadow of a premeditated storm.

Before my letter, I understood that a pre-death comes
before a death, that the myths of righteous justice
aren’t inked, they’re forged by metalsmiths—swords

and locks and bars and guns and anchors and shackles.
Because before blindfolded Lady Justice tipped
her scales, the stone she was chiseled from understood nothing

of the terrors that turn humankind to muted stone.
Before and after the myth of Pandora’s Box, there existed
many girls and many boys and many boxes, bound by chastity

locks on children’s treasure chests that monsters trapped them in,
gagging them with their semen soaked rags. Before me too,
my truth was a pneumonia-cough, each effort to dislodge

pierced my breath. Pandoras, before it’s too late, wipe
the world’s blame from your long-neglected prison sentence:
Pandoras—let them see what you guard. Brace

for the quake: the powerful pains of humanity
will always collide like continents—foundations vanish,
new, fearful topographies loom to force

all disbelievers to their knees, shattered in awe,
in earthly humility. After freed, we—
myself, the man, and all the others who were befores—

will be soft soil, thawed from a long freeze.
Empathy, that gentle, consented seed
planted in our bodies, aches to burst forth—

impossible not to bloom, not to birth blades
of grass, pliant beneath the breeze, as reverent
as new buds escaping, to, once again, open,

a graceful release, petals like fists that finally surrender,
a shape-shift of upward turned palms—
ready to receive—even when shackled at the wrists.

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.  http://anne-champion.com