Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

 

 

 

I Sarah, in Black

 

I did not control the February frost in 1692,
my crepe dress wearing thin, lingering in a lice filled jail.

They say I never followed Puritan values,
four little ones at home, married twice, widowed once.

They say if I was pure, I would not grow the seed.
It should have shriveled out, blood down my leg, down into the white snow
down into rats’ tails, down into hell where pure women
suffocated by rope,

My small girl, Mercy, gasping for breath.
My own daughter Dorcas forced to testify against me, she was 6.
My baby born in jail, stopped breathing there.

Never the same after that, my ghost knew.

Abigail threw her own body around, saying I caused her fits, seduced her away from God.
My own body hungered and shimmered, a quickening.

My second husband’s name was Good, I could not claim to be good.
I wanted, I was poor, I fled, to be nude, to be nude

with William. That time he died inside of me
before he could point his long fingers at my belly in the courtroom,

blame me for laying still, for letting it happen.
These lithe willows, like young girls’ legs

that reverend says won’t close, turn brown and weave into each other.
No nutrients can get in, no light.

We squeeze out tiny, tethered bone bundles, layers of life, red apple skins
that lose their shine, grow fear.

We hide from the snow and the high up places.
They drink and we are the Other to them at their tables, their pulpits.

They say I brought on this death, this famine, this cruelty, this ice.

Don't let this part of the ride defeat you,
my mother whispered to me one candle-less night,
one man already crushed to death under rocks.