NaPoWriMo Day 10: "As Cold as a Witch's Tit"

A mashup today, though one of the prompts just slips in at the very end.

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt: "Today, I’d like to challenge you to write a poem that starts from a regional phrase, particularly one to describe a weather phenomenon." Only one phrase came immediately to mind that I knew I wanted to write about, "cold as a witch's tit," although research reveals it is not in fact regional or old, though it sounds like it. Oh well. The sample poem, Natalie Shapero's "Sunshower,"  about the phrase "the devil is beating his wife," blew me away and in a lot of ways my poem is an imitation of hers with its feminist themes.

Today's PAD Challenge prompt:  "For today’s prompt, write a lone poem. Perhaps the poem is about a solitary wanderer or person who just prefers to go it alone. Or a lone winner, lone wolf, or some other solo individual. Or alternatively, I’ll accept poems that are about loans or that are about being alone."

The image of a solitary woman looking at the moon has carried over from the poem I wrote yesterday -- it has stayed with me. The prose poem form is partly influenced by the Shapero poem, but more by the prose poems that comprise VCFA faculty member Mark Cox's Readiness, which I was reading with admiration before bed last night.

As Cold as a Witch’s Tit

Perhaps the tits were cold, those minutes upon the gallows, a hard wind out of the east slicing easily through prison-ragged clothes. Perhaps their bodies stiffened with cold as much as rigor, hanging. In New England witches were hanged only, you know. Could they have been cold in Europe, before the bonfires were lit, their nipples starting up in terror of the flames? Oh wait, they weren’t actually witches after all; we understand that now, I think, most of us. Except the ones who don’t, who still feel the devil’s breath prickling the back of their neck everywhere they go. Except the ones who understand but don’t realize they still hate women and the wrong sort of men that much, hate forms of power they can't grasp. Except for all of us who still secretly want there to have been witches, some dark and fantastic capacity active in the world, who can’t get enough of Salem, who want the cold hanged women to have been true witches and innocent too. Anyway. Back to the witches and their tits, their teats, or tetts as it is spelled sometimes in the old texts. Their wrinkled, hanging dugs after so many children. Their barely-rising breasts, if they were very young. Their strangely lovely, luminescent globes, though they were heading into middle age and how could they still be beautiful. Something unnatural in that, to look so fresh, preserved in themselves. Chilling. Of course I’ve put this all backwards, unable not to think about actual breasts. The tits are not the sufferers but the agents of the cold. Cold to your lips, to your touch, to your heart, oh evil mother. Oh woman, how dare you not be warmth only, fount of mercy never ceasing, twin roes for every spiritual or carnal hunger. Oh man, oh women who loyally stand by the men. Oh children that we are, all of us saying it, it, it me. I’m sorry your mother didn’t love you the way you needed. I’m sorry your child died. I’m sorry your cow and your pig pined. I’m sorry your member failed to rise. I’m sorry it rose when you had the bad thought. I’m sorry not sorry the woman turned from your touch once and again to lie back to you facing the window, solitary, the cool strange light of the moon falling upon her, the points of its crescent rising deep inside her chest.

--Draft by Anne Myles. Please do not copy/quote/cite without permission.