Part One, Question Nine: The Separate Body
and allow the first salt of the house its gloss.
She can create a natural shape, can change
into the likeness of a human body, fallen
through sight and touch to possibility.
Her touch can perceive abstraction in things
and her inner senses are stored in the imagination.
Her reason appears bitter on the tongue.
Some other body, smoothly fashioned in flesh,
is interposed between her body and her touch.
Some smooth body, latent in her first blood,
flows to her mind. The smooth body speaks of art,
that it can be done without devils.
It is done by bodies or smoke or serpents.
By matter or thinking or witness.
The story is not a lettuce or a lump of gold:
in the desert, an old woman appears to a young girl.
After, the light appears different
from what it was before. Her power
is difficulty—is defect—and it follows
the demand of other women, their loss, their doubt,
their death. It cannot heal they who injure.
Her dwelling is a remedy for doubt and argument.
She allows them to know her metamorphosis.
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.