A Spell for Fools:
“Purple heather
Crushed sage
Three drops of maiden’s tears
The first blood of a virgin
A pomegranate with six seeds
A kiss from your true love
Dance nude under a full moon
Mix the ingredients:
Take the pomegranate and drip the juices-
Mark your body with sticky crimson.
Draw the symbols that will invoke your desires: wealth, love, revenge, happiness!
Eat the seeds, one at a time
And watch as the earth opens
up like a mouth”
A canvas blank
But mind vivid with passionless shades,
And hands slick with a wicked purpose.
She knew when she gyrated and swayed her hips,
The Calamity and Disasters that would follow.
Stars fell like Autumn leaves
And crunched beneath her stride.
The moon resides with a yellow fog-
Yellow and slimly
like the belly of an eel.
They labeled her a whore
For the way she bewitched them
With her verdant eyes of lost and untouched fields
And lips smudged with salt and coral.
“Bruja” “Witch” “Sorceress” “Evil”
“Let her burn!”
A lonely boy went to the dark
Gloomy woods of fabled legend,
Following the scent of warmth and
Acceptance.
A shadow, black like a messenger’s wings,
Followed as he stumbled and cried,
Cackling and grinning
As the meat tendered and festered.
The boy arrived at a cottage
Constructed meticulously with bones-
White as death’s face, and fashioned
With strips of rotting, pink flesh.
Soon a woman appeared-
Trim and ethereal,
Teeth sharp and thin like blades,
And eyes woefully feral-
“Bruja” “Witch” “Sorceress” “Evil”
“Let her burn!”
But with the twist of her spine
And the brush of her mane,
He befell to the curse
That has all men playing dumb-
“Bruja” “Witch” “Sorceress” “Evil”
“Let her burn!”
So at the next full moon
They set off to slay the witch,
Burning her House of Bones-sealing
The windows and doors and leaning
Close as they heard her screams.
Cheering and jeering
As decay and burnt hair
Permeated the fertile air-
Grotesque favors that linger
On their tongue and finely knit clothes.
“Bruja” “Witch” “Sorceress” “Evil”
“Let her burn!”
A ghostly laugh
And a sudden eclipse that looks like a grin-
Whispers on the fetid wind
smug that she has won.
Mecca-Amirah Jackson 