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The Witch

Her grim little cottage haunted the corner
of La Londe Street and Loblolly Lane.
Broken latticed slats and shuttered windows
crouched behind a hawthorn’s unkempt edge

that all but blocked the cracked stone path
snaking through wildly uncut grass, twisting
past the pole of a lightless lamp
to the rain-stained panels of her door,

to that same peeling paint that we had to pass
each day on our six-block saunter to school,
cruel children of the burgeoning suburbs.
And so we were

who called her Witch,
whose old and failing home we mocked,
whose steps we littered with hurled sticks
and the smashed remains of crab apples.

We accused her from the street
as we pedaled our 20-inch Sting-Ray Schwinns
in summer, bound for haircuts or ice cream,
the name we gave her echoing

in the heat behind us and on ahead
through the harlequin halls of Autumn leaves
dappling the sidewalks of Halloween
when we did not dare offend her.

Only once was she ever reportedly seen
by rumor alone, no true believer.
Old and hunched, she struggled through dusk,
flightless, with a bag of groceries.

—
Kevin Burris lives in southern Illinois. His work has appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, and many others. His latest poetry collection, Inside the Clock, was published in 2023 by Pine Row Press.

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