by Erin Carlyle
We set a girl to burn,
and in the ruin of her body we
stamp our feet—cake the mud
and ash. We set her to burn,
and we’ve been taught to hold
the tongue of ourselves, to kill
that ancient stone-pit in our stomachs.
The father yelled: she is not a witch
as her body was rolled
through the center of town,
and we thought, are we also dead?
The other girls met hand to hand
as she lit up the night,
and we thought, Is this all?
Erin Carlyle is published in journals such as Driftwood Press, and she has a chapbook with Dancing Girl Press. She is the Assistant Poetry Editor at Mid-American Review and an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University.
Hawaii Pacific Review 