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.

Tuesday Poem: Previously published in lingerings (online) in 1999

Hog Barn at the State Fair         

  

The next pig out of the chute

is mottled black over pink,

delicately etched, so it looks

like she’s wearing lace.

And she’s running as fast as she can

around the ring, trying to get away

from the man who wants to show her,

so he hits her harder and harder,

with the stick he's supposed to be using

to guide her toward the judges

who want to take a really good look

at the fruits of his husbandry.

Watch her shoot like a bullet on pointy legs,

wounding the audience, and the man too,

now red-faced, huffing after her, his stick

landing hard on her back. The crack of it

like thunder, making us cringe.

I want to squeal when he hits her.

But then someone nearby, whose favorite

food, like my father’s, is big thick pork chops,

might blow his stack. After all she has

too much mind of her own, that pig,
she lacks discipline -- she didn't turn 
when he tapped her gently, did she? 
No, she went the opposite way,

perverse little twit. She asked for it

by slobbering on his pants leg.

Sweet Jesus, when she’s back in the pen,

the applause is a cloudburst that tries to

wash everything clean. Give that man

a ribbon! Make it black and blue!

Quick as the wind, get the next pair

out and running around the ring!