I love the confidence of this poem with its declarative statements and self-awareness. The simple, one-word, place-naming title provides a lens for readers to view the poem without ever using the word “witch.” There’s a calmness to the speaker of this poem; they know who they are and what their capabilities are. The matter-of-fact tone extends to inflicted pain and intended bleeding; this speaker is powerful, without apology, but also in reaction to the failings of others. They know they would have been victimized in a place like Salem, in a time of trials held against those accused of being witches. Here there is no false accusation; the qualities are described more as gifts, or at least necessary responses. I appreciated how this poem turns the witch-trial narrative on its head—those accused of witchcraft in Salem experienced hysteria and false narratives. This narrator seems to say, “I am witch,” shapeshifting into animal forms, haunting, healing, communing with nature, having the means to produce blood, and to end life. This felt to me a deeply political poem, gesturing backward to provide context for how we think about spellcasters, and also ripe for our time when reproductive rights are under attack. The speaker in this poem fights back, claiming space, choice, control, and the narrative itself. —Rebecca Hart Olander

The language in this poem is gorgeous with its mythical allusions, “transit timetables,” and “radial spring.” The blending of mundane details (the fact of a Tuesday, cheap wine, a bed, a pair of shoes) is wonderfully mingled with torches, the performance of a quartet, and that beautiful last line. I love all this poem holds—its Brooklyn and its train platform, its funeral and mourner’s Kaddish, its Hecate and Persephone. And especially the heart of the poem—the grown child visiting their original city after moving away, returning after the death of a father, and the accompanying confusion that loss adds to understanding the world as it is now (for both the adult child, and the mother). There’s a confusion one might feel when returning home as an adult anyway, and to do so on the occasion of loss is to plunge one back into childhood again (given yet another layer in the poem when the mother—from dementia, grief, or both—mistakes the child for the father). The displacement felt here aptly conveys that state we live in after loss, that time of crossing over into new realms of being and of magical thinking. Hecate, goddess of ghosts and crossroads and magic, is the perfect guide. —Rebecca Hart Olander

The more I read this poem, the more I love it. The title is evocative and mythic. We plunge right in with the speaker from the start, in the action of swimming to shore. But then we’re in a dream of a daughter told by a mother. “Daughter-hair” slips through the mother-dreamer’s fingers, like time does, for all of us. This is a poem of time, told in what feels a place out of time, but also a place steeped in time, and elemental. Post-dream telling, we are back in the world, where these two speakers both have daughters who are now grown and are also grown daughters themselves, of now-gone mothers. The middle of the poem is the ashore time, on a rocky coast that these two women lie down upon in what feels a ritual. Steeped in matrilineage, the poet writes of wombs, of bodies over time, of slippage, of strength, of how we begin in the cells of our mothers, of how those mothers are now gone, and of how we birth our own daughters. The slipping hair, the falling stones, the gone grandmothers—this poem feels quietly epic, earthy, cyclical, and beautiful. —Rebecca Hart Olander