To the End of Redaction* by Anna Lee-Popham

May 22, 2023
Poem title: To the End of Redaction* Poet name: Anna Lee-Popham Poem: The news suggests envy for women over forty with big data, hijacks quiet predictions of disasters while your statistics divert death to other nations, in the end, you are only an aggregate, only epidemiological, you hush small concerns in your body, a vast trove of anonymous consensus, the people who probe your health and your passwords will want to marry your children, your hemorrhoids are no big secret to pharmaceuticals, you scream into the singing mouths of your meticulous records until you forget your throat is not only your throat, and your irritated airway might be covid or forest fires or cancer and you forget to say your name, and the news tells you to ride a woman’s body like it’s a view and you look down at the ridges and loose rivers of your hips and your lips and your anchor. * This poem draws from Daniel Estrin’s article “Vaccines for Data: Israel’s Pfizer Deal Drives Quick Rollout— And Privacy Worries?” on NPR. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Anna Lee-Popham Previously published in PRISM international, (February 2022). Anna Lee-Popham is a poet, writer, and editor in Tkaronto (Toronto). She holds an MFA Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Education Creative Writing Certificate, where she received the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Her writing has been longlisted for the CBC nonfiction prize, first runner-up in PRISM international’s Pacific Poetry Prize, and shortlisted for The Fiddlehead Creative Nonfiction Contest and ROOM Magazine’s Poetry Contest, and has been published in Arc, Canthius, Riddle Fence, ROOM Magazine, and Autostraddle. Anna co-hosts the Emerging Writers Reading Series.