The Witch
They hung the dusk like lanterns—sallow, thin—
and the forest answered in a voice of sap and rust.
Branches braided into fingers, knobby as knuckles,
each one stitched with hair and name, voodoo effigies
swaying slow in the breath of the yellow moon.
Between knots of root and hush, devil traps
were scratched in the dirt like prayers that curdled,
circles of salt and bone and old glass eyes,
waiting to hold what should not remember how to leave.
A clearing opened like a mouth of tarnished silver,
and Little Rocks lay heaped—pale teeth of river and city,
the small monuments of someone’s once-beloved,
left in piles that the wind arranged into graves.
They clinked when the yellow king passed on his parade
of slurred crowns, a procession of moths with human faces,
his laughter a thin rind scraping the inside of night.
He does not speak like men; he catalogues fear
and sells back names to those brave enough to forget.
Carcosa breathes beneath the trees, low and tidal,
its syllables slipping like oil through a cracked throat.
Mist unbuttons the edges of the world and stitches them
to a horizon that never was, a lake folded into sky.
There, the witch walks—if walking can be called such motion—
she floats with the hush of falling feathers, skirt skimming
both land and water as if neither is worthy of firm hold.
Her soles do not touch; they whisper to the moss,
and frogs raise their heads like question marks when she passes.
Her eyes are two small coals of winter; her hands keep secrets
in the hollows of her palms—pins, a child’s shoe, a bell.
She goes collecting—names, breaths, the last light of porchlamps—
threading them through the dolls that swing like tiny crucifixes.
When the dolls turn, whole neighbourhoods remember midnight
and the obedient tilt of doors closing too late.
Sometimes she kneels and presses her forehead to a pile of Little Rocks,
and the stones hum with the shape of lives they once supported,
sending back faces in the tremour of moonlight—smudged, pleading,
letters written on backs of envelopes that never met dawn.
The trees mark time with the slow opening of their mouths,
sap mapping cartography of sorrow along their veins.
Vultures, careful as undertakers, fold lantern wings and wait
for the yellow king to unlearn the names he gathered.
Beneath the devil traps the earth keeps breathing, patient
as a prisoner counting ceiling cracks through years.
And CARCOSA leans in, gilded and obscene, whispering
that the witch has a ledger of debts and a taste for finality.
At the edge of the clearing, where water forgets to be river,
the witch lays a palm flat and reads the ripple like paper,
then lets it go—nothing left but the thin sound of absence.
The dolls swing an answer no one asked for, tiny heads bobbing,
and in the far branches, a child’s laugh caught like a moth.
The yellow king lifts his crown and tips it to the dark,
which accepts with the hungry courtesy of salt.
Night folds its hands, counts off names like a litany,
and the forest, satisfied, closes its mouth for a long, long while.