The Richmond Transients: Belvidere Witch Woman

by Elly Call

Origins aside,
Some might have said Her mother
Dedicated Her to some archaic deity,
With requests for beauty or fertility or wealth.
The deity had granted a nimbus of hair, luminous through the car exhaust.
When He bent down to Her, it was an aggressive kiss introduction,
And She pleaded at His face with Her wet paper hands.
They didn’t work,
So She conjured with sharp bone fists.
She had a sinuous back.
He held her wrists.
There was the stop-go road commotion.
There were the yellow metal flashings of the street and the sun,
And there were also Her black lunar eyes.
She was full of filaments of everyone’s futures and pasts,
Distant, primordial.
I wanted to ask what she saw on the backs of her eyelids.
But she was in the middle of fighting for her home,
The left tile at the end of the park’s unfinished sidewalk, and
I didn’t have any change.
We were in different places.

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