Sighted people tend to react to darkness like birds when their cage is covered for the night. And with my cage concealed, I rested on a bed of nettles, Hansel as my dream. Or rather, I drowned in our mutual dream, having slipped into him while asleep, and when he awoke, I—Gretel—remained in deep slumber, nestled as him, my Hansel, cast from our mutual mettle who had become my vessel, a prosthetic memory, my false limb I leaned on for support as I waded through hallucinations of ambrosial nourishment and death-threats from a cannibalistic witch.
Our hunger, too, was part of the dream. Our land suffered the illusion of severe famine, as it does now—and reverberations of aversion, of scarcity, toppled our calm, turned our dwelling into the realm of hungry ghosts, our new needle-thin necks, too spindly for victuals to slip to our bellies, to satisfy humanity’s gnawing craving.
But what of the passerines,
the wrens and cardinals,
but what of the nightbirds and day larks that follow
from birth to birth, trail all children from the low-hanging canopy,
peck our crumbs and eyes
so we may lose the way?
I remember Hansel, draped in sleep. I remember clawing our way away from the hood we hid in so we wouldn’t appear as children—so tasty to eat, so vulnerable to snatch from school, so easy to abandon—faceless fears unfaced under hooded headless cowls, howling and caroling, easy prey for darkness to find us in the restless forest of childhood, that insidious darkness that shrouds us in night.
By the caldron appears a gang of hangry ghosts that dream of fattening up Hansel, testing and tasting his meat, sticking him in a stockade, threatening to reduce him to soup stock. I reside deep in the pocket of his heart, our pocket-watch chain * When Hansel awakens from my dream, he unhooks the cage’s latch to find me. I sing and alight on a branch, alert him to mysteries that might trap or loose us. He heeds my warning and remembers when he played the woodland spirit, the woodsman. He remembers when he enjoyed a sandwich-laden picnic, abundant with all riches and no witches. He remembers when he and I stole away from home so stealthily that even the birds scarcely saw us tiptoe together as one. We were not afraid of the dark nor of being children. We were not even on a path. It was that right. But what of those foreshadowing raptors, Martine Bellen is the author of ten books, most recently, An Anatomy of Curiosity (MadHat Press, 2023) and This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2015). Visit martinebellen.com. Image: Jardel Vieira, unsplash.com Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
fetters us to fear and spiritual poverty,
where we remain until his remains are swooped up
in roaring thunder, a reminder of the bitter taste that remains
on our tongues from our origin tales, our oral moral tales, told by mothers and fathers as warnings that dreams of sweet riches and witches are buried in the heart of any forest, its warden, a starving crone, whose tummy is a potbelly kiln, flames eternally licking lips for fatty renderings of fleshy ambitions, burning yearnings.
Stay small, the stories warn,
share the fear that hungry witches can banish us, vanish us.
And I, who have been asleep under the fleshy covers of others
for a hundred and eight lifetimes, had lost my insight
as easily as one loses their way in the dark,
in this old-growth forest,
where broken bones and boles rest side by side,
nursing on one another’s limbs and the soil horizon.
the captors that caw and circle the skies,
the harbingers of culinary cutthroats to come?
