Some definitions of Witch
Carcass of rags
the dead-rat stink of old milk.
A beyond the pale beggar,
runt of the litter.
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Gleaner of herbs
hallower of the compass.
Cunning hedge rider,
measurer of fire.
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Midwife of shadows
low vixen with blood on its maw.
Deliverer of silence
to the henhouse.
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Lighter than a bible,
priestly ink is gravity
beneath her flying feet.
Her body writes into the sky.
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Blended with the earth
she wears a moss cloak.
Some procure her remedies.
She is a scapegoat for bad luck.
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A childless wraith
in a child’s picture book.
The worst mother
man ever invented.
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The method of kettling
troublesome women.
A peck of black pepper
in the milk-and-water blether.
*
Practitioner of forgotten ways;
of rituals, sayer of spells.
Barefoot earth-listener,
older than God or television.
Wouldst thou like to live deliciously? Black Phillip The VVitch 2015
I have marked you at the gateway to the forest inhaling the wildwood like medicine.
And I have sent the most velvet of hares as a gift of my heart to usher you from the burdensome world.
You have been the pious daughter – washed your father’s rags in the brook. Have you not earnt enough of god’s grace?
Your parents bade you pray for light while heaping shadows round your character. Harken as they brand you witch, without a lick of proof.
Come follow, I have such bounty for you. There is always a little bloodshed when a woman is born.
Lilias Adie(c1640-1704) Witch who had sex with the Devil (Daily Mirror 2017)
And still the clickbait designed to pique a fever – though clicking arrives you at a neighbourly face conjured up forensically.
She’d been six foot tall, according to her bones, buried intertidally, like suicides – pressed down by a stone to dam reanimation.
Such wickedness requires a belt and braces execution. Who’s to say the devil will not wake her to bring about more sickness to the fold?
A podcast now, and Lilias’ confession, we learn, is duplication of another peasant woman’s admission, some fifty years before:
The devil put one hand on the crown of my head another on the soles of my feet and claimed everything between as his.
Then you learn they lost her skull a hundred years ago, and the image of her face is drawn from photographs.
And her bones were gathered up as trinkets – even wood from her coffin you can see in a museum whittled to a walking stick, fancied up with silver.
Resistance Spells
Spell to Take Back the Night
As a fox, then. A rust blade through the beer belly of midnight; that’s how it goes.
Take to your workbench crack the nitrogen bubbles in your knuckles, gather your fibres and needles.
Do it now, as the sun crosses the street all hands in its pockets; all devil-may-care.
The barbs of your needle stabbed into the fibres will ravel them in on themselves.
When your hide is complete and you are fixed safe inside then you shall go to the ball.
Summoning Spell: The Body
Call back blood to blood. Call back the spectacle of flesh. Fasten on your head with wire, hold it like a scrying ball in your savvy hands.
You will see now, clear as clear the acid burns, the lotus feet, the force-fed and the skinnied-down. Your face floats just below the surface of the glass.
Midwife your very body home from every shabby playboy den and launder up the air with smudging sage. Call back the spectacle of flesh. Call back blood to blood.
Disarming Spell: The Enchanter
This is a lesson in forgetting; unpicking yourself from the love song he constructed which you ruined for him with your clumsy ways.
This is when you stop saying sorry; when you decide what shoes to wear. Trace a circle around yourself; use the wingspan of your arms to gather all the sky you need.
From this leeway you will behold the woman who trod warily about her daily chores; the one who bit her tongue so much her words were rendered void.
If you desire it, tromp barefoot - the critic spitting résumés on how you have performed each day has melted clean away.
This is furthermore a lesson in self-conjuring.
Note: The United Nations defines violence against women as: any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life.
Invidia (Envy) Engraving by Zacharias Dolendo(1596-7) after design by: Jacques de Gheyn (II)
You wake as Invidia again, burning up, heart racing like a cooped mare. It’s 4am and the sun hauls you upright with its accomplice the blackbird; her showy bright song insisting itself into the electric shell of your ear.
In the engraving you eat your own heart but it’s too flighty to catch so, you burn a path through the house charring the carpet in your wake. You catch your naked reflection and see a changeling, muscled and prunish.
You open the fridge and stand in its light but there is nothing to sate and when the door closes your evil eye takes in a picture of a woman dancing, drunk, flying arms plump with collagen.
She wears your favourite dress. You hate her smile; can’t summon how. Soon you are ripping her up, forcing a fistful into your mouth. The carton of soy milk bought to temper this heat helps to drag her all down your maw. You are otherwise unsure of its voodoo.
34 Symptoms of the Menopause
A woman somewhere is typing on the internet my heart wakes me up like clockwork. Now, another woman – my whole body feels like a bee box too small for the bees.
At 3am, a woman Googles burning tongue another woman searches cortisol, dying ovaries, blood sugar, light sensitivity, vampirism, migraine.
On a message board a woman writes Does anyone else . . . another woman is typing . . . yes, I can’t leave the house I’m stone tired, my underwear is sack cloth.
A woman reads about rage feels parts of her skitter under the wardrobe. Everything in the pantry wants to hurt me; sugar is hex, coffee is bad abracadabra.
A woman, unbidden, pictures the dress she burnt with an iron when she was nineteen; irredeemable she writes. I sobbed right there, in the bank.
Is it normal, a woman asks the women is it normal to stand in a line-up of yourself and not recognise you at all? Is it normal to be scared of driving, the washing machine, scales? Is it normal to wake up in a bread oven night after night; to flush blood away like you have emergency stores; for words to fall from your left hemisphere?
And all the women on the internet faces blazing in the blue light of their screens, say yes, this is normal we are here we can hear you now.
