For Odette
Una bruja, a witch, the Church would have called
your aunt, used her for tinder by the fort
in Old San Juan. Yet proud
of her Indian roots in the Spanish
ghettos of Allentown, she denied nothing.
Her faint smirk conspired with the slander—planting
enough doubt, she appeased someone’s cancer
a little. As a child, you thought nothing
of adder’s tongue and bastard lime in jars
on the shelf above the Corn Flakes, even cloves,
clavos, whose trees when they flower flare
like rushlights, or nutmeg, nuez moscada,
fool’s heroin, nimble dross in her hands
she never claimed could heal, only confessed,
when accused by needy neighbors,
she caught very few colds. She lived hard
but died old, her past a weedy yard,
an impudent myth you’re still growing into.
David Moolten’s last book, Primitive Mood, won the T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009). His chapbook, The Moirologist, won the 2023 Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming. He lives in Philadelphia.