Ohai There Toni Sulfur

There’s a witch in the woods with her mouth sewn shut.

The villagers long ago with their torches and shovels buried her deep, but not before they closed off her words to keep, needle and thread for the rights of man, and ungodly creatures silenced for less.

There’s a witch in the woods with her mouth sewn shut, deep in the earth and deep without.

I went to the woods to find something there, and I heard the screaming from afar. I dug and I dug and got my hands bloody.

She turned up with her face the color of honey.

She smiled with a smile of blood blackened lips, and she tried to strangle me with hardened fists.

There’s a witch in the woods with her mouth sewn shut.

I took her home after a fight, because what else do you do with the strangest of frights? She followed me home and I brushed her hair, washed her ruined fingers, and changed her from her raggedy dress to jeans and vest.

I took care of the witch in the woods with her mouth sewn shut.

I put her up in the room in the attic. I showed her the world of things now changed and also stayed the same. I unclipped her lips string by string so she might destroy that which once wronged her decades past. The man who owns the city is now sitting on his chair with fire in his home so pretty and fire in his lungs coming up from the boards and up from the world come to call for soul and all.

She rights the wrongs of the men of this town.

There once was a witch in the woods, her mouth is now open, her mouth is now free, and when she kisses me– it tastes like pine woods and burning ash, and a whole world of magic lost once, and found again.

Inktober Art Prints by JessLauserArt