N.M. James

N.M. James Poems

The Best Poem Of N.M. James

'Salem, Massachusetts 1692' By Palo Alto

Salem, Massachusetts 1692.
Nine generations back my great-grandmother Susannah North, is executed.
Her crime: witchcraft! Enchanting young women to exhibit fits of rage, which to some resemble a certain insanity. As punishment she is hung up high for the world to see. Her death served as a warning to all those who dare oppose established order. None shall suffer a witch to live, and today this message still stands.

Lebanon, Ohio 2014, Leelah Alcorn a seventeen-year-old trans girl is accused of shapeshifting. They stone her to death with their words and now her headstone bears someone else's name. That same year, the witch-hunt floods into chat rooms. Game developer, Zoe Quinn takes the stand; accused of enchanting women to believe that they can be loud, out-spoken, or promiscuous and still survive in a male-dominated world. They used sticks and straw man as kindling. No woman is spared this torture, not even us.

When I was 13, I played with the dark magic of a boy's bedroom, but he told everyone; and I saw my power stripped. He called me something else, they called me something else. A message like the one they sent my great-grandmother Susannah North nearly 300 years ago. A woman who laughed in the faces of her accusers. And as these stories stack up like colonial pyre, our eyes begin to fill with smoke, our faces flush red, and our hands burn. We feel comment sections crackling beneath our feet, but what they do not remember is that we have been resurrecting for as long as we have been feared.

Us witches know how to speak in the devil's tongue, how to swim no matter how they tried to sink us, turn prison bars into snakes. We are descended not from witchcraft but from women unafraid of the truth. So no matter how large your village is, no matter how many believe your charade, we will continue to laugh in your faces. If practicing magic makes us monsters or if having power makes us something to fear, go ahead take us to court, tie us to the stake and watch us rise with a thousand heads. You may have found new ways to burn us, made a spectacle of everything we stand for, created a world in which we are always guilty of fighting the ropes that hold us back. Women have always been forced to endure your trials, but a true witch will never burn.

N.M. James Comments