As I mentioned in a previous post, it was Emma Bolden’s work that introduced me to Toadlily Press. I recently got ahold of her and she was gracious enough to share a new poem and talk about her current poetry project.

In the wake of reconstructive jaw surgery Emma found herself reading The DaVinci Code, which referenced “Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, a kind of handbook for trying and punishing witches and other heretics against the Catholic church…..  Before I knew it, I was obsessed,” Emma writes.

She spent nearly six months researching “religicomagical practices in early modern Europe,” during which she actually travelled to Austria to “see: the landscape, the woman, the village, and, eventually, the poems.”

Without meaning to, Emma found herself devoted to a book project that told the story of a witch and the villagers that accused her of witchcraft. She worked hard to remain truthful to practices and historical ideas without being bound to the story of a specific historical figure.

As I worked through the book, I realized that I was really working through my ideas about difference – how “the Other” is so greatly feared, and so often stripped of his or her own voice, identity, and humanity so that persecution becomes a possibility.  Through giving voice not only to the woman but to the dangerous forces that labeled her as a witch, I hope to have broadened the manuscript to explore ideas about what I feel is the most dangerous part of being human: we can so easily see others as Others, and not us, and not like us, and, therefore, respond to difference not through empathy and understanding but through confusion, rage, and even violence.

You can find some of her latest “witch” poems in recent issues of The Greensboro Review, Indiana Review, The Journal, Linebreak and other venues. Her chapbook, How to Recognize a Lady, is included in Edge By Edge.

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THE WITCH SHOULD LAMENT THE WORLD

Wax men folding     flamed

.   arms over pins     or posies

. woven on the altar     a wreath

ringed by buds     hidden from the priest’s

. eye     I thought     the world

. was a word     for me

the sallow     field wearing

.       its wig of rye     emptying dark

. dreams     into the wood-

colored curve     of my ear

. malleus     pounding power     pounding

. to quiet     the body’s bickering     need

and need     and need     but

.   my world became     the embrace

. of flame     the sun’s gold

gown a gleam     over field and     far

. I fell     from grace     to feel

. the village     unlace

my skirts     tie my right

. hand to left hand     to the steps

. of the stake     not

yet     not yet     first

. the taste     of seared

. meat     cradling the whole

of the fire     between

. my teeth     first     the flicker

. face of the ordinary     boy I’d never quite

not seen     before

. that light     which drew upon his face

. shadows     spells     the soft

incantation      of long

. arms dancing      first

. the geography     of hands     the hushed

rustling     rumors     of pyracantha scratching

. my back      unfeeling      I

. only breathing     a world of unknowable

perfumes     calendula     candle

. wax     the red     tapers I dipped

. anointed     lit     singing a  spell to create

those bushes     that moment     that

. night the hinge     our bodies made

. a door     opening

to another world     the alien

. intoxication     pink and pinker

. aster     nasturtium     poppy     fire

was a sea    in which I swam

. suspended     from his body      every

. cell’s song      a singe      I

was less     flesh       than flame

. and fate     was a ring     I forged

. for my own finger    poor

girl     possessed     of my own power

(fist appeared in The Journal)