Daughters of Witches

Superstition is buried in the bones of us down here. The South buzzes electric with songs of the dead. No one has been convicted of witchcraft for many years in Mississippi, but places like Witchdance, a stretch of land off of the Natchez Trace, still echo the hundred-year pounding feet of women conjuring moonlight, slips and strands of bright in and out of shadows, hair down their bare backs, wearing circles in the grass. Ghost rivers sing with the everlasting wail of drowned Indian tribes along the Pascagoula River, and bridges cry for babies birthed and buried beneath them, long discarded in the dark, wrapped in water blankets by terrified mama-hands, trembling the ground awake with their runaway feet to receive them. Rolling fog unfurls carpets of kudzu and mist hovers low over the bayou, weeping willows line lake edges and eyes blink back from behind curtains of Alligatorweed. The land lives. The water is awake. If you wait, you will feel the aliveness of it all, it hums the stale air like a lone guitar chord from an in-between place.

Madgirl ElegiesMegan AinsworthDecember 6, 2017Megan Ainsworth Comment

S1:E1 "Lock Her Up"

The first three notes tell you everything. Two hands, four grim octaves, played in fortissimo. Not so much a melody as a warning.

I’ve only just begun the seventh measure when the water starts. A fat drop bounces off the piano lid and I lean forward, feeling it’s a sign – at last, I have managed to play each note with such accuracy and purity that something has been moved. The next drop slips between F and G, followed by two more drops in quick succession.

I remove my glasses and look up.

An ancient crack runs at a diagonal across the ceiling, splintering on its way to the chandelier. Back along the crack, water pools from a quarter-sized patch of plaster above the piano.

Secret CircusLeigh HopkinsNovember 29, 2017Leigh Hopkins Comments

§1: Perpetual Translation

Years and thousands of miles.

Walking, hopping trains, riding buses, surviving on your wits and sacrifice and sometimes, the kindness of strangers. The fact of your presence here is a testament to your strength and smarts and will to survive.

You shrug and say it is the grace of God.

Here is the Mariposa Port of Entry. Here is straddling the two faces of Nogales—Sonora and Arizona—universes apart. But when you roll your “r”s they sound so much alike.

Mariposa. Butterfly. An earthbound grub reincarnated into an airy winged creature that flutters as free as a breeze. For a moment, it’s possible you believe that metamorphosis is available to mere mortals too.

AsylumShefali DesaiNovember 15, 2017Shefali DesaiComment

Holy Mother Monster City

MAYBE: a pregnancy is a loaded gun.

I CAN TELL YOU THIS NOW: For two years, in my early twenties, I worked as a counselor at a secret shelter for pregnant women in Jerusalem. I was relatively new to the city those days.

HOLD UP A SIGN: Welcome to the underbelly of Jerusalem.

THE WOMEN: Rich, poor, middle class. Moslem, Jewish, Christian. Religious and secular. Israeli, Arab, citizens, legal immigrants and illegal refugees. Ages 13 to 36. They all possessed wombs that worked. They all, for mostly ominous reasons, had to hide their pregnancies from the world.

A PREGNANCY IS A SECRET ABOUT A SECRET: the director of the shelter used to say. Beneath the city's mythic cloak of holiness were the stories behind these pregnancies.

THE STORIES: Sex, power, race, rape, religion, money, and sometimes even murder.

MIFLEZETAmital SternNovember 8, 2017Amital Stern Comment