For an Appalachian kitchen witch
The dead come back as braided husk and hair—
cob effigies she wraps in rags and leans
against a bedroom wall so they can hear
her griefs and grievances, their faces clean
without a mouth to make plain how she’s wrong.
But when they start to rot into the floor,
the scraps she’s learned to live with for so long,
the carved-stalk limbs and torsos crushed to flour,
recede, and she’s offended by the loss.
Though she may tell a stone slab she forgives,
or sniff the wadded collar of a blouse,
or glimpse them in the rain, she knows they have
no breath or blood outside the icy stream
of these slips and dreams. Still, she slips, she dreams.
Brian Brodeur
Brian Brodeur is the author most recently of Every Hour Is Late (Measure Press 2019). New poems and essays are forthcoming in Hopkins Review, Southern Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Founder and Coordinator of the digital interview archive “How a Poem Happens,” Brian lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley. He teaches creative writing and American literature at Indiana University East.
Latest posts by Brian Brodeur (see all)
- Not Even the Future’s Like It Used to Be: Rita Dove’s Apocalyptic Anthems - February 25, 2022
- Bidart’s Silences - October 28, 2021
- Barcode Ode - October 24, 2021
