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The Salem Witch Trials

To Make A City

Submitted by Editor on 17 January 2025

Chinecherem Veronica Enujioke

"Women have slippery tongues, and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women those things which by evil they know; and, since they are weak, they find an easy and secret manner of vindicating themselves by witchcraft" - The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), 1486.

For all victims of the Salem Witch hunt.

 

I am plucked before dawn

from every dream I have

 

and I pick pieces of myself

finding something to hold on to

 

like a cancerous cell clings to life

refusing to let go.

 

Even life here is broken.

Our memories float 

 

like shards of a broken mirror. 

I race against my city

 

while another city 

thrives in my belly.

 

When I am delivered of this one,

before I give her a name,

 

I shall first sing 

to her, all the names 

 

God bears in my language;

names for joy,

 

names for disaster, 

names for when they hang her 

 

on gallows

for saying her name.

 

At home,

we ask strangers their names

 

and count how many blinks 

before they speak.

 

At home,

even a name is spell enough 

 

to set ablaze a whole city.

We cannot bury our dead,

 

we know no befitting songs.

Our beds are open graves

 

where we chant

with ashes on our foreheads

 

and our legs buried in swamp.

When this city comes forth,

 

I will send her far away 

where strangers do not pounce

 

on names obstructed by the tongue.

Where her songs will be loud

 

And her cities her cities

will be home for pariahs,

 

for everything that wants

to sing, walk another way.