Jacob Budenz
1/20/2017–1/20/2021
& we rise swamp-green & giggling
fingers dripping w/citrus juices
reclaiming your coal fires
for our sabbats
& you will watch one day
orange-stained skin
darkening
& the orange reddens
yellows
leaps up to lick you
leaps around you
becomes you
& we know you hardly need help
self-immolating
but we help you
in our wide-hearted grace
& we leap
we witch bitches
over heaps of flame
coal-fires sparked from dumpster fires
impregnating us with devils
& the planet sings with us
though gutted already
—Submitted on 02/14/2021
Jacob Budenz is the author of Pastel Witcheries (Seven Kitchens Press 2018). His poems have appeared in Slipstream, Entropy Magazine, Assaracus, Pussy Magic, The Avenue, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. Budenz is a queer writer, multi-disciplinary performer, educator, and witch with an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins University.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
