Something less than addition, more than subtraction
in this black band of handprints on the witch’s walls:
The oily diary of her unsteady passages
from room to huddled room; her shed skin’s witness to
ten thousand unremitting nights alone.
I am the glass, sent to reflect her, recording
in my reporter’s notebook the jellied milk
of her curdling eye. I must be her & the girl that was her,
the bride who cried out beneath her husband
to bear the hateful son. I put on his first shoes, hung
from a hook, growing their long hairs of soot.
She asks me why I won’t forgive her. She asks
me not to print her name. I am the sheath
of ice upon December trees’ bare arms.