Eleanor Lerman
Witch, Walking
It’s the damp, gray hour
just after dawn. A light wind, hesitant:
not sure yet whether to lay a claim
upon the day
And here is me: old, getting older,
a woman with a small dog
A modest dog. I am a modest person,
waking, dressing to take my pet
out into the possible wind
Also: in this poor county
of women and witches,
it is the hour when witches
are permitted to walk their dogs;
always, they stay on their side of
the street, I stay on mine
Here, in this county of
wreckage and grief
at least this is a safe hour:
No spells are cast, no damage
is done. In acknowledgment,
we wear our traditional costumes:
For me, my old frayed jacket;
for the witch (my witch),
a long black dress, torn in places,
with a dirty hem. And she has
a cloudy eye
Sometimes, she nods at me
and I nod back. Her dog is
enormous—actually, I think
it is a wolf. Red eyes, sharp teeth—
exactly what you would expect
Then as the years go by, I sometimes think
that I hear this animal speak to me
In truth, the dog I have now
is not my first dog. This is not
my first witch. And now, in this life,
things seem to be repeating themselves
The house gets cleaned, the groceries
are delivered. I try to hide
the damp gray hours in the closet
but you know how the story
will be told:
She crossed the street. The faithful
dog followed. But even I can’t tell
anymore if I ever went home
The Last Report from the Underground
Cold moonlight poured like water
through cracks in the windows; winter
broke the locks and barged in, banging
up the stairs in hard shoes—it was always
winter on East 10th Street. Rain on St. Marks,
rainy days on the crosstown bus to nowhere
The Vietnam days. I was a girl when girls
knew nothing, when all the boys looked like
the Jesus kind: black eyeliner, black coffee,
black hearts, because that’s what we liked
then, when our own hearts were broken
Rumors reached us that troubadours had moved
into the Chelsea Hotel so we flew downtown,
chewing on the ends of our hair. For years,
we waited for a message but the news from
the prairies never reached us; the papers we
read were already damaged by conversion therapy
and we wouldn’t have believed them anyway—
no one ages in troubled times. No one ever ages
when they walk the streets. Overhead, the sky
kept building itself out of blocks of sun and
clouds and shadows: we stood on the rooftops
and howled at them to come closer and
I think now, that perhaps they finally did
But that’s not the end of the story—
this is: the last report from the underground
was riddled with bullets. The last time
the East Coast was heard from
it had already crossed the border
but rumor has it that any day now,
it will confess to how and when and why
Eleanor Lerman (She/her) is the author of numerous award-winning collections of poetry, short stories, and several celebrated novels. She is a National Book Award finalist, a recipient of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts for poetry and the New York Foundation for the Arts for fiction. Her most recent work is her seventh collection of poetry, “Slim Blue Universe” (Mayapple Press, February 2024).