Part One, Question Ten: Witches Can Change

The truth is a beast and it changes

          her. (There is no actual beast and

                    she cannot really be a woman either,

          since her shape exists in the air.)

Again, the origin of her argument

          moves her into her body and she

                    transforms pain into art. Again,

          her wishes deceive her and lost

women ride in the night with Diana—

          or with silence. They know her mind

                    holds great distances in its anger.

          Again she changes—metamorphosis—

          not an actual girl—not a true girl—

          not a prayer. (She was free

                    because she did not give her mind.)

          She changes without the permission

of God. She is sleeping in her sin,

          in her transformation, in her need.

                    The beast dreams of her touch,

          through which everything sweet

seems bitter. And her house is found

          in the words taken from her. In

                    the work of her body. In the body

          of a beast. In an assumed body.

Touching her world, she says:

          When witches question, they are

                    with the truth—a beast which is air

          and argument. It changes pain

into a mountain of gold.

          The wolves which sometimes question

                    her eat the fierceness of her strength

          and consume her true shape.

They are true wolves, and they

          devour thought and time and sleep.

                    (She was at last found lying

          in the wood, changed into her strength.)

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.