Driving the gravel road,
our pockets are full of every
glowing stone to pull us from danger,
save us from the waiting witch,
the oven ready for our tender flesh.
This is not that story.
No one led us here.
In this story, we find
each other on the cliff
overlooking lake, under flaming leaves.
In this story, we shed our burdens
before each other, remove the cap
of responsibility, the cloak of schedules.
We unwind scarves of news reports
tightening around our necks
as our children are legislated
out of existence, our sisters
forced to carry children
who will not survive, children
ushered into a hostile world.
We remove shame’s red cape,
hair untended, weight not lost,
wrinkles betraying our 3 am worries.
We remove our boots, bare soles
against heart wood planks. We feel
the forest’s ache around us, our arches
throbbing like instruments to an animal song
we can not hear.
We peel off the costumes of our lives,
we three maidens, we three mothers, we three
crones, we nymphs slipping our bodies
into steaming water, ripples stretching
across the lake. We cast a spell of remembering.
We cast a spell of forgetting. For a moment,
the sea does not rise,
the laws are undone.
In the forest, the leaves shift as a wolf
picks out her secret path, chooses
a soft bed of leaves, turns herself
three times around, stopping finally
to sleep.
–
Patricia Davis-Muffett holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Alchemy of Yeast and Tears (Kelsay Books, 2023) and her work has won honors including the 2023 Erskine J. Poetry Prize, Best New Poets inclusion, and second place in the 2022 Joe Gouveia Outermost Poetry Contest as selected by Marge Piercy.
© 2024, Patricia Davis-Muffett
Halfway Down the Stairs 