CALLIE S. BLACKSTONE

I do not need tarot cards to predict our future because I am a proficient witch without them

It will be winter solstice

green pines climbing up         out        of the valley
                 up   the crest of the mountain
that cradles your childhood home

It will be winter solstice,

a place that only you know:
a place I have avoided,
scared that your mother will discover me

In that place, your spirit
rustles branches         drops pinecones
quietly               snowy floor

Your spirit rattles naked birches,
boughs crying out with your grief
short spurts floating intermingling
with my foggy breath
because I am still here
and you are still dead

In this place that no one knows
as well as you did in life
and in death, your movement
lives on through the trees

Cold creeps into my feet
The cold of a corpse
left abandoned on the floor left to lie
in rot

Cold creeps into my feet

But your body heated up        didn’t it
when the flames devoured you?         You got all hot?
Released to the winds?           Carried back
to play amongst the birches yet again?

It will be winter solstice, and I will find you
my love. I will wear my grief plainly
on this moon face. I will not hide. I will no longer
carry fear.

I will enter the woods         looking           searching
for you            I will find you there   I will find you
once and for all          our spirits will meet     the green haze
around the trees         we will stir each other up

we will rise     rise     rise     the stars              floating
dancing          breezes lifting us against the coming
of the new sun

light is returning

stirring

stirring

therapist, exorcist

You return to me.

You find funny ways to do it–
first the keys, next the tarot,
then the shivers up
and down my spine:
you always return to me,
the only constant

your death

Today you manifest
in front of me
in the chair in my office.

You use a different name,
wear a different face,
but I sense you in the thinness
of biceps, the lankiness of form,
the rigidity of your frame,
both living and dead

I could find your body in the dark

I know who you are despite
the name your new mouth carries.
Maybe you manifest
as who you could have been
if you hadn’t grown into a poet
who liked the taste of gun metal

He tells me he is haunted,
demons enact punishment

are we put on this earth to pay for misdeeds
are we meant to suffer

He tells me he is too symptomatic to work to eat
                (the thinness of those limbs)

And if you were here, I could feed you:
and if you were here, would you have taken
what you needed?

Will I always carry and ponder your hunger?
What will it take to feed you, boy whose appetite was only satisfied
on gun metal and blood and brains? Candles? Tea?  Time
Tattoos              Chocolate        Writing                        Donations
Walking
Walking?

What will it take
to fill your belly

What will it take?