Posts in Madgirl Elegies
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. 

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Rebel Yell

The center of me caves, my eyes bleed, I re-walk the church aisle alone this time, no welcoming on the outside, just villagers with fire, witch-hungry. They’ll burn this madgirl and the elegy between my teeth if I don’t spit it out as quickly as I can. Time runs in a circle, but sometimes, it does run out. 

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