Chapter Fourteen: Follow Here

Phoebe Reeves

All things are under the wings of doubt—
cattle and the fruits of the earth,
men and women,

the menstrual flux, the flow of milk
and infirmity.
Between her legs,

with her hands, she summons her health
as if it were flowing from the knife,
alone without

the foundation of loss.
Some men came to a stream.
One of them took off his clothes

and went into the stream
and tasted it and declared that it was true.

Without words, action is secret.
Out of the water,
the man’s hand suddenly burned.

Under the threshold of the door,
the bones of a name said
I have my own hands, and a little hole,

unknown to touch or look.
I have seen the fields, the air,
and been within the year to prove this.

This poem is part of a book-length project which erases the Malleus Maleficarum, or the “Hammer of the Witches,” a text that was used during the Inquisition to hunt and convict witches, written by Heinrich Kramer and James Springer. I have taken the 1928 Rev. Montague Summers translation as my source text, available at http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/.

Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and now teaches English at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College in rural southern Ohio, where she advises East Fork: An Online Journal of the Arts. Her chapbook The Lobes and Petals of the Inanimate was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2009. Her poems have recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Drunken Boat, Phoebe and Memorious.

February 14, 2017 Season: Spring 2017 Section(s): audio, poetry

Chapter Fourteen: Follow Here

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