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    Witch Wife
    Witch Wife
    Witch Wife
    Ebook70 pages41 minutes

    Witch Wife

    By Kiki Petrosino

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    About this ebook

    The poems of Witch Wife are spells, obsessive incantations to exorcise or celebrate memory, to mourn the beloved dead, to conjure children or keep them at bay, to faithfully inhabit one’s given body. In sestinas, villanelles, hallucinogenic prose poems and free verse, Kiki Petrosino summons history’s ghoststhe ancestors that reside in her blood and craftand sings them to life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSarabande Books
    Release dateApr 3, 2019
    ISBN9781946448040
    Witch Wife
    Author

    Kiki Petrosino

    Kiki Petrosino is the author of two books of poetry: Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013) and Fort Red Border (2009), both from Sarabande Books. Her collection Witch Wife is forthcoming from Sarabande in December 2017. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is founder and co-editor of Transom, an independent online poetry journal. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

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      Book preview

      Witch Wife - Kiki Petrosino

      One

      Self-Portrait

      Little gal, who knit thee?

      Dost thou know who knit thee?

      Gave thee milk & bid thee beg

      Slid a purse between your legs

      Stuffed thy brain with blooms of blight:

      algae, wool. You’re lichen-white.

      Gave to thee such vicious lungs

      for breathing glitter past your wrongs—

      Little gal, I’ll tell thee

      Little gal, I’ll tell thee!

      I, who cut your palms with glass

      & poured in poison tasse by tasse

      I am nimble. I am young.

      I peeled you with a pair of tongs.

      I laughed when no one loved you back

      & raked the mist to scarf your flesh.

      We come together in the dirt.

      I a rake & thou a twig;

      All day we watch the long pig dig.

      All day we watch the long pig dig.

      Young

      After Anne Sexton

      A thousand pilot lights ago

      when I’m a teenager half-gone to flab

      in a low ranch house crammed

      with ribboned handicrafts in January

      I go pulling all the false candy canes

      from the stale mulch out front

      clown-sun blinking whitely over me

      my bedroom window an ear

      painted shut to keep the calliope of dreams

      from sounding. Nearby, the Douglas Fir

      thickens over older strings of lights, the chipped

      blue bulbs & the gold, each wrapped in peeling floss

      & held by keloids to the scruff

      of an unloved trunk. Probably a million tiny

      ice crystals drift on their rainbow way

      while the feverish branches chafe & flake

      & I, in my runny custard body

      with its buried corkscrew of hate

      tell the tree my story-songs

      & think God can really hear

      above the cold & the snapping plastic canes

      boots, belly, my dreams, what’s wrong.

      New South

      am born

      light girl, light girl

      each step blessed but slant

      born in procession

      already my mother, her mother

      the same her mother, then

      her mother the same

      marching by night

      under southern pines

      or a dream of pines

      on the night road

      my feet grown strange

      my neck turning back

      over the dream of land

      we left or never left

      land of trouble where

      I’m always marching

      my hair cropped close

      my mothers beside me

      in robes & crowns so

      I go back, go forth

      light girl, light girl

      crammed with light

      & when my mothers say

      don’t you tell them about us

      don’t you ever tell

      I look

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