
Two Poems by Jennifer Wilson

GRETEL
they want you
to smile
politely, say
nothing
and just
hold
your tongue
lest you bite
it off
letting
the weight of
what tells
your teeth
to move
to make sense
of itself
or show
its understanding
of how
the oven
works.
operations
of this sort
are not
suitable
for girls, so
brooms assume
a gender
and take
to the floor
pushing bones
aside with soot
and cleaning,
making neat
the furnace
for its fire.
HANSEL
from the oven, fingers
from blisters form
as the skin remembers
before the fire.
mostly they recreate
the pain & writhe
catching the coldness
of the air in gaps
between their
blackened nails.
there was something
more, but what?
states of matter
are meaningless
when emptier of feeling
than the furnace
is the body
as it strains.
Jennifer Wilson lives in Somerset, England, with her husband and spends her days as a faceless retail drone. Her work has previously appeared in Awkward Mermaid, Chaleur, Fly on the Wall Poetry, & Molotov Cocktail, & is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bone Lit's YANYR anthology, Elephants Never, and Feminine Collective.
Illustration by Theodor Hosemann of Gretel pushing the witch into her own oven.