Dara Siegel

The Witching Hour

Go on,

get on with it.

So unconcerned are the creased bedsheets

and needles in my hair.

My mind is the wrong circle for this time of night, so

heavy with unending.

I pick baskets of B flats in my dreams

crush sleeping pills that fall between

my skin and its sticky piano keys.

The debtors have arrived early tonight

to reclaim the powder on my face

to suck the serums and creams

I begged the good old witch to relieve

But she wove gauze across my cheeks

trapped carpenter bees to nail my lids awake

glued my sight to the screaming light of this

seemingly religious day

So dry, dry is the unblinking eye that sags

like a noose dangling

under the blackened hat of sky

I squint, flip, dig, roll my iris back towards the

unbending bedsheets sweaty and stuck to my stinging body—

So ebony is the midnight hour, the moaning hour,

where I lie awake,

aged and alone on these

flat mattress bones.

God's Dinner Plates

Listen to the sitting place of origin.

Its blankness gathers waiting worms from

waiting rooms

like placemats

carried back and forth

without tongue, without root.

She cannot stop this creation of un.

She is lichen coarse and unseasoned

on the hemp hilltop.

Her disbelief sleeps but is not sleeping

not dreaming but weaving some kind of

synthetic lattice a

plastic superlative.

So this is what it is to be without

memory

to think without the

memory

of thinking

to pluck the inner skull for images

unbleached by the high noon heat.

She is dead skin cells between ears.

A face of cigarette ash

to fill the gap between her eyes

a pharmaceutical snow globe

with feet pointed steadfast at the sky

Each night in her hospital gown

they place petals of forget-me-nots

down her throat

powdered pills dissolve

like frothy soap on God’s dinner plates

A rinsed clean slate

Who, the next day,

will emerge the same way.

Dara Siegel is an educator and writer based in Toronto, Canada. She is a wife, mother and lover of anything that brings inspiration on idle Tuesday mornings (especially dogs). Her poetry has been published by the League of Canadian Poets, Voices 2023, and in various online anthologies. Find more of her work on Instagram at @theexistentialbean.