Modern Magic

The witch Baba Yaga once baked herself bread
out of spiders and liars and red razorwire
that was garnished with flowers from the vaults of the dead,
and sweetened with lye from a child’s funeral pyre.
It was light as the crisp, cracking bones on the fields
and as sharp to the taste as the ash-scattered shards
that were all that remains of the swords and the shields
of the warrior king and his bold bodyguards.

In a chicken leg hovel at the edge of a wood
the witch Baba Yaga licks the dregs from the spoons
that she used to stir soup, spiced and thickened with blood
that the dying ones spilt from their widowing wounds.
But her low kitchen table will never be laid
and her bonewafer banquet will never be served,
while ghostly white whistles pipe a last serenade
as she’s swept to the moon by the swerve of the earth.

The witch Baba Yaga in the coldness of space
weeping tears for the cage and her gingerbread home,
but icicled, weightless, they fly in her face
with the regular tick of a deaf metronome.
Now her broken-backed biscuits have crumbled to dust
and there’s rust on her tongue and there’s clay in her gaze
and the snow on her coat forms a bitter white crust
for her oven’s as cold now as yesterday’s grave.