Willie Lee Kinard III
All spells begin with water.
Rod in hand, flick of it against the stinging sky,
Mama nem stir the air to tears.

Casting is what they call the girls putting in work
'round here & yes, we witches are fishermen,
whip glamours in men's overalls
so long as fish rise to the surface
mere hours before morning's stilettos.

Believe me—at the edge, we make them levitate,
each saddling our silence as if any noise unweighted
would loose a daemon slick-scaled & wide-eyed
with no bellies by which to bind it.

Where I'm from, folk learn conjure early,
the kind of favor you pray over a pole for
& what is Greek is still a gospel:

Here, Jesus is a sigil with light bread
& there is always a Pilate & a piercing before cooking,
a struggle so steady, we laugh at our buckets,
that is, yes, we flay the fish with care.

Cricket-fed & fried light, worked to the bone,
this how we kill our familiars:
There is nothing, then something.
Something, then nothing. It is wristwork.
It is sobering. It is holy. We gather.
We murmur. We swallow in worship.
from the journal HAYDEN'S FERRY REVIEW
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"A snapshot of any given Saturday of my childhood, this slick little poem tries to hold all the wonder & power my 4-year-old self witnessed watching the women of my family shapeshift. Toggling between world-class fisherwomen one moment & humble churchfolk the next, the title evokes a conversation on classic(al) conjurations of gender performance & holiness, asking not 'What would Jesus do? (WWJD)' but imagining further possibilities for rural Black femme existences."
 
"Fragment of Lost 12th-Century Epic Poem Found in Another Book's Binding"

"Scholars had believed the poem, which comes from a cycle of chansons de geste–epic narrative poems–about Guillaume d'Orange, existed, but there had previously been no physical evidence that this was true. The fragment only runs to 47 lines, but it proves the existence of a poem thought to have been completely lost."

via THE GUARDIAN
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What Sparks Poetry:
David Blair On W. H. Auden's "Petition"

"Naturally, I enjoyed the subtle rhymes so much that I did not even notice them, nor the poem's sonnet form, a perfect spell working on my barely conscious mind because here, in the last line and a half of the poem, was a sentiment so sudden that I could, without embarrassment, sport around with it typed and taped to my binder on a strip of paper, a fortune cookie fortune, a restaurant's first dollar: 'look shining at / New styles of architecture, a change of heart.'"
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