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enjoy this writing from Ralph Monday in the free Down in the Dirt 2014 PDF file chapbook: The Girl Next Door and Other Poems (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2014 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book The Girl Next Door and Other Poems

Order this writing in the book What Must be Done (a Down in the Dirt July - Dec. 2014 collection book)		get the 372 page July - Dec. 2014 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

The Witch Within and Without

Ralph Monday

Funny how some young people show
in their face how they will look when old,
almost as though the age patina exists
from birth. By wiping away the green oxidation
with imagination, the future spills out
like termites from a log, the past an imprinted
image burned into a shroud.

In the computer lab this young girl sat like a
sphinx scrying the screen for a vision of some
digital dragon come to breathe fire. So intent,
not knowing the flesh would melt away like
gears turning in cogs, the simulacra of her today,
the witch within, the appearance she would take on.

            But which witch?

One staked in the dark ages like some collector’s
insect? Twisted and torn on the inquisitor’s rack,
human threads wrapped around a spindle?

            Both witches and more.

She is and will become the hanged witches Sarah Good,
Martha Carrier, sheriffed to the noose, inert dolls
suspended by an age’s filaments.

            She knows none of this.

Her kind has been accused before the garden was prepared.
Her terrible loins state of being covering men’s black eyes,
her breasts, buttocks, marked by moles, the stain
of Ecclesiastes.

Better that she give up her webbed spying, hobble pregnant
and bowed through the kitchen, maid to the domestic
priest. Cover her nakedness with autumn leaves, stir not
the serpent in the conjure pot.

Paint her fingers and toes with a veneer of acceptance,
wear the rituals of her sex, dress in subtleties like thin
pencil strokes erasing the witch within.
Demure eyes turned downward, a smile like smoke lifting
up all her ages, she sees the witches without.

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