Anuja Mitra
The Witch Is Crawling Out Of The Oven
but she’s not here for vengeance.
Actually she’s quite calm.
The famine is over
and her house is blooming again
its predatory colours,
red, pink, blue.
They’d tried to burn her before.
Now her nerves knew the shock.
The witch is crawling out of the oven
but she’s not resentful.
Really, she’s had time to think.
The boy and his sister were smarter than most
and they were children, whom you couldn’t blame,
because they were children.
They will grow to be villagers
with nervous hearts and violent hands
and they will learn
to beat the women they can’t burn,
red,
pink,
blue.
The witch is tidying up her kitchen
and oh, it’s winter again, come in,
stand by the oven,
lean in,
we all need somewhere
to keep us warm.
Anuja Mitra is in her third year of a Law and Arts degree but would generally rather be writing. She enjoys indie films, mint chocolate chip ice cream, and petting her small colony of cats. More of her writing can be found in the last three editions of Signals and in the second issue of Starling.