Category: Poetry for Issue 6

Every town has a witch
living at the top of a hill
in a run-down house
and none of the neighborhood boys
will mow her lawn,
not even for ninety dollars,
because her eyes are milky
and she smells like vinegar;
a side-effect from cracking open the thighs
of babies and sucking out the marrow
in order to keep living
in that run-down house
on top of the hill.

Once, a mile-wide hole in Iowa was discovered
and the excavation employed one hundred
female archaeologists who revealed
an unfathomable history of missing children;
milk-carton girls who were never seen
again; they just piled into the hole
to become salt, so low in the dirt.
A fingerprint of a breeze
ruffled the prairie grass
around the hole and people said
that was ascension.

You can find most things
in the same place you left them.
A witch finds her newt eyeballs
in the cupboard next to the Ritz Crackers.
A little girl finds her twin in Iowa.
I found a statue of Joseph
buried in the front yard.
He was upside down,
which made sense.

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One day in the shower the little ball of grief thawed and came loose and poured out of her
in waves, fauceting from her nose, her mouth, maybe even a little from her ears. She
tilted her head forward, bemused, and watched the thick black of it halo around the drain,
and spin, and when it was done and she wiped her face limply the darkness made a water
cyclone until it was almost as tall as she was and then formed a beast without eyes that
said, What do you want?  And the woman said, Go find others, and without waiting even
a moment the thing was out of the bathroom, leaving stepping-stone inscrutable puddles
all the way to the door, and then nothing beyond the door.

Her head was less heavy but something else in her suffered. She found herself thinking of
the beast at odd hours (putting water on to boil for pasta, returning a book to the library,
the smell of gasoline at the pump station). Sometimes it would send her text messages
that let her know who it had gotten. Butterfur dog tailtucked away, he would write. Deep-
dyed man angry over wife. Catholic school-girl no more in school ever. And each time,
she felt her heart nearly break open with affection, and she loved these messages from the
creature so fiercely, and she grew to believe in its one-day return. But never.

She was walking back from the grocery store years after he left and thought she saw him
in an alley, and almost cried out, Dear monster, you’ve come back, but actually it was just
a splotch of indigo paint against the crumbling brick, or the billow of dress pants over the
leg of a smoking man.
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