These Stories Are True by Chelsea Bunn

These Stories Are True

1. The first thing is the most important thing. Only you care— I don’t. I want something good, hard, shamefully obvious. Picture millions of women violated. The intentions point to need. Listen, I am the truth. People deserve to be let down. 2. I have a lot. I’m beyond. I did owe him. I carried him. All these years. Fueled by privacy. Women have loved. Men choose. To live. I want my own. 3. I came when I learned anyone needed my absence. All women regret hope. Speak louder, trust me. I want, and I plan. I need that anger. My President, perhaps I disappoint. 4. huge huge enormous long often predator my flaws 5. True, I never learned that power. Asking isn’t a question. These women— I have run from them. I left these women cautious, disabled. They tried, I think, to forgive, which is nothing to me, a man given to hurt. And I can hurt them all. I love you, my only anguish: people who have given me anything I want. *An erasure of the statements made by Senator Al Franken, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Tambor, and Louis C.K. after they were accused of sexual misconduct.

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Chelsea Bunn is a poet and educator living in New Mexico. Her work appears in publications including Snapdragon, The Big Windows Review, Dogwood, Georgetown Review, and a forthcoming anthology by The Right Angle Publishing. She earned her BA in creative writing and her MFA in poetry at Hunter College, where she received a teaching fellowship, a Norma Lubetsky Friedman Scholarship, and taught creative writing for eleven years. She was selected as Thinker in Residence by Art in Odd Places in 2016 and was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize twice. She was born and raised in NYC, and currently teaches poetry for Santa Fe Community College and UNM Osher.