The Witch Series

 

History: The Immolations

Imagine fifty thousand

women on fire at once,

illuminating the shifty

landscapes of time.

Fifty thousand queens

on thrones of cord wood

drenched in oil, then set ablaze,

as they gaze at the men who despise them.

Watch their feet blacken, then their legs,

pudenda, bellies, wombs, their breasts

and hearts, their mouths agape, screaming

into silence, arms with match head hands alight,

hands adept at catching babies, making balms,

tinctures, poultices, offering small comforts, spells

for rekindling hope, draughts of blessed forgetting.

Smell their hair burning. Know them

for what they were, and still are: grandmothers,

mothers, wives, daughters, spinsters, lesbians,

midwives, nuns, saints, wise women, healers,

inventors, women who speak up for others,

who have little care for obedience any more.

Take the ash of their sacrifice into yourself.

Understand it as the benediction,

you need right now, to carry on.

Imagine them strung across the horizon, 

brighter than all the stars.

The Witch Series

               Collage by Romare Bearden

Conjure Woman

She’s got them all teetering on

the tips of her fingers, tiny as mice.

One flip of the wrist and all the men,

who ever tasted her; then turned 

their faces away, and all the men,

who drove them to ruination, 

go flying to who knows 

where, and who cares?

She holds them up in yellow

curtain light, watches them shift

their weight to keep from falling.

Each one of them knows what he’s

done or not done. It’s chilling them

to the bone to see she’s wearing her

haint blue dress. No more feathers,

no Adam and Eve root. That’s how

very much danger they’re in.

Outside, her bottle tree glistens,

as she squeezes them for good measure,

rolls them between her palms, before

laying them out like sardines

in the bottom of her reddest meanest box.