Devin Gackle graduated from Loras College with B.A.’s in Media Studies and Creative Writing. When she’s not watching things like Murder, She Wrote, she enjoys writing/performing songs for her songblog, and writing stories. She also loves reading, sarcasm, flannel shirts, making movies, making up words, caffeine, and wearing mismatched socks. Her work can be found in The Fable Online, Outrageous Fortune Magazine, and Dime Show Review.
Website: http://devingackle.wix.com/portfolio
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The Witches
After Cavafy
What are we waiting for, gathered on the hill?
The witches are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening on the scaffold?
Why do the judges stand there without speaking?
Because the witches are hanging today.
What more sentences can they pass?
Once the witches hang, their power will no longer overshadow us.
Why did we rise so early,
and why do we stand so fearfully
on the dirt ground, in silence, wearing our work boots?
Because the witches are hanging today
and the judges are waiting to give the order.
They have even prepared a list to read,
replete with charges, with familiar names.
Why have our judges and we ourselves come out today
wearing our crucifixes, our simple linens?
Why have we put on masks of so much hatred,
and fear bubbling with magnificent force?
Why are we carrying our grief
Tragically worked in knots of hemp and rotten fruit?
Because the witches are hanging today
and things like that disturb the witches.
Why doesn’t the hangman come forward as usual
to secure the necks of the condemned, as they say their last words?
Because the witches are hanging today
and they’re trembling with composure.
Why this sudden hesitation, this anticipation?
(How solemn people’s faces have become.)
Why are the gallows filling so nervously,
everyone shifting in place so lost in thought?
Because the dawn has broken and the witches have not confessed.
And some who are related cover their sorrow by murmuring
they are not family any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without the witches?
They were, those souls, a kind of power.
Devin’s photography
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