Sorceress

Marie climbed the ten-foot torch outside of the drive-in restaurant and lit her cigarette. A little drunk. A little hair caught on fire. Like a halo. She was sixteen. Her brothers were far away, deer hunting, hidden in camouflage among Canadian Geese, transfixed by white-tails bearing majestic antlers, some in velvet. Still, the brothers got wind. Word and weather blew in. Sky transformed to a milky broth. Hail hammered cars and nailed the ground. Thor crackled. Lightning bolted.

Still, great horned owls perched in oak trees above regal gold chanterelles, and the blue-veined cheese at Mary’s Dairy Farm continued to thread into penicillin. Regrets became wings or fins—she could fly out of here, or swim the crawl through the mother of rivers—river of gin, tarragon of juniper. Of alchemy. For miles—a stand of pine knelt back into thin bog. She could ripen into sweet everlasting—a mirage of boats sailing above water in the Fata Morgana. She might become a witch or Madonna, circular, swollen, into unusually overripened fruit. Cherries.

This is how she fed herself.

With child. The spine—

a keepsake.