Part One, Question Eleven: Who Is In the Womb?

The truth is in the mother’s womb

and it is an obstruction.

It prevents her failure with the help

of instinct—of beasts,

of wolves who follow her to hold

the night and drink

its blood and devour it. The year

burns her memory.

Such things are not incredible.

Witch midwives do not

kill children. They take them out

of the room and,

raising them up in the air, observe

the beginning.

Note from the writer: These poems are part of a book-length project which erases the Malleus Maleficarum, or the “Hammer of the Witches,” a text that was used during the Inquisition to hunt and convict witches, written by Heinrich Kramer and James Springer. The rules of my erasures were that I could delete, but not rearrange or add, except for punctuation. Although at first, I began by deleting at the word-level, as the project progressed, I became much more aggressive about my deletion, and also found myself focusing on certain repetitions. For example, almost every time the word “heresy” appeared, it became “her,” in the poem. It was in this way that I began to uncover the woman these poems speak about. Titles are anagrams of the original section titles.