FROM BRIDGET CLEARY, ONE OF THE LAST WOMEN TO BE BURNED ALIVE ON ACCUSATIONS OF BEING A CHANGELING, TO BROCK TURNER
Snake, they took me in the night. I am told
I was taken in the night
though my memory is muddy water,
I am told you run your fingers through it.
Dipped those creatures’ claws
into tepid stream, shoved your fists down
as far into the mud as they could go.
Did you find me screaming, where I cannot see?
Did you get yourself
stuck,
did you call it my doing?
My death, too, was a question.
Was I
still alive when they set fire to me,
or had I already left myself?
Only used the heat to pluck
what was no longer mine, they said,
they told me I was no longer
mine
and there,
in that non-memory,
the serpent writhes.
I am unhooked from my name,
a witch gone to the faeries with a jaw unhinged—
lie down under the slicked flame, like
the sound of a sea storm which takes up the notion of air
from your throat, lie down in the
clearing—
the little witch lies,
she lies,
she lies.
Did you know my husband claimed
to have only killed the changeling? Tell me,
did you think her to be human?
Think on that, boy.
They didn’t think me human, either, boy.
I, I was already gone, long before, they said.
And that they burnt me for hours—as you will burn
her for years— before the fire finally
took me/ took what had changed in me—
again, again that damn taking
My eyes, my eyes were not mine, they said.
Did he speak to you
in the night, too, different from the way
he spoke to me? Did he tell you,
they will let you free, same as they
let him free?
Did my husband teach you how to
click
the twigs together
until you had something
to give to the masses? Keep
clicking
until something snapped.
In a courtroom in 1895 it was read aloud,
these exact words slipped out into the
ears of listeners, slick oil, where they gave my
husband, my murderer, only
15 years. After all:
“Terrible and ghastly as the case is,
we cannot call it willful murder.”
(I am not willfully
expunged—
No, no, he did not mean it, Bridget—
I was possessed,
and so,
fault goes dissolvent.)
Fault slips back out from under her skirt,
takes its trail off the twigs in her hair,
unropes itself from the cavern of her body,
slithers back behind that trash heap,
breeds, and breeds, and breeds,
but gives no name.
Maybe I died, and maybe, though he killed me,
maybe no one was really to be blamed, here. I
said his mother had
gone with the faeries, after all,
I said I’d seen it—
I said what I knew and it came in the night
to murder what I did not.
And still, when they speak of me,
they call me the last witch, but
You, snake, have birthed her anew. She has
crawled from your sticky skin
all amber-jelly and sorcerer’s hands.
You have turned her into something else
by twisting this back
by making them believe you did no wrong.
I do not want to hear about your crying.
I want you to hear the way hers echoes.
The way mine echoes.
You have made her come into this world,
as I left it. Changeling, you have called her, as you
called me, as he called me.
Witch, witch, a body sunken by possession.
She who cannot remember, she cannot remember,
she cannot
remember.
What a pity she cannot scream of the ways
she has been told she was taken.
And you, so supposedly soft… careless violent taker,
you drag the unlit torches toward her
so she may see you
spark them.
theartofmadeline
areudirty
andulkaphoto
blakekathryn
