Three avocados rooting in the window
and a Meyer lemon cake on the sideboard
are yesterday’s lessons of contrition.

I tell whoever will listen, I’m done with
these habits of temperance, my gold silk
robe and Medusa hair mocking its own

tidy garden of snakes. It’s time to unlace
this absurd bustier and loosen each constraint
to purpose. I’m done here, do you hear?

I spin in taffeta song like a girl with her
fairy wand while wolves circle my cul de sac
unwilling to settle. I have come to believe

there are wood sprites
offering a fire ballet in my honor
and lightning bug static

to celebrate
this new mutiny, right here
in my witch’s kitchen.

Image credit:Lorelei Cohen

Sara Clancy is a Philadelphia transplant to the Southwest.  Her chapbook Ghost Logic won the 2017 Turtle Island Quarterly Editors Choice Award. Among other places, her poems have appeared in Off the Coast, The Linnet's Wings, Crab Creek Review, The Madison Review, Misfit Magazine, Avatar Review and Verse Wisconsin. She lives in the desert with her husband, their dog, two ordinary cats and a psychotic cross-eyed one.