New Writing

Malignants

Jon Stone

“People were enthralled by witches, prodigies and omens because, in an age of catastrophe, they feared for their futures.”
Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinder

By the 1970s they no longer flew bareback on goats,
their nakedness umbra-dark against the moon
and all the more lewd for it, to cluster
urgently in unguent-pungent clearings
and thunder their heels on felled crosses.

Instead they ran rental shops,
wove the black tape round toothy spools,
chanting canticles to ward off magnetism.
Orgiastic dances were out; Cannibal Holocaust was in.
Shelf-space once afforded to grimoires,
scrying dishes and sigillated candle-holders
was given up to contraband copies of The Evil Dead,
Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave.

Now, of course, they’re into file-sharing.
Using GoogleEarth, they plan with precision
the path of the plague, where to best hit the harvest.
I’ve seen the photographs of missing children
hand in hand with the tall and pear-calved lady,
the ligature of her chignon, her steep sunglasses.
I’ve heard how they come to be so far abroad:
zapped there as clouds of atoms
by a headless bear-spirit.

The pond in Gerrards Cross has turned to blood
and the Gallagher brothers dip their shirts in it.
The perennial glow at night is said to be
a build-up of radiation from thousands of hexings.
I myself saw the Shee-Cavaliers last week,
careening in front of cars. I caught one’s eye
and it was gemmed with a raw tincture.

But I hear that juries are acquitting them.
I hear that gifts of cursed eggs are exchanged
and that witnesses grow the tails of oxen.
Thank God, I say, for The Magazine of Scandall,
for The True Informer and organs like them.

Oh, yesterday, a child of 12 fathered an imp,
and yet the government are worse than useless.

 

Jon Stone lives in Whitechapel and is originally from Derbyshire. He co-edits Fuselit. His poems have been anthologised in City State: New London Poetry.