Brenda Mann Hammack

FITCHER'S BIRD


   after the Brothers Grimm

What she saw reminded her of bladderwrack,
boiled sugar plums washed out of body.

She could not tell heart from bloodstone, axial
bone from tusk fragment. Only sisterly touch

remade them like so much delicate piecework
(stitching collarbone to shoulder blade, radius

to scaphoid, ruching eyebrows, moles). She’d
fashioned vengeance of her own out of offal, bones,

those mutilated scraps of sisters, then propped
proxy in window. Still and waxwork

beauty: obedient, ghouly. With candied jaw,
soon-to-be-widow furzed, sepaled,

flowered before funeral. Her maker fled,
avoiding church, misleading all who asked

of Fitcher’s nuptials. This little bird told little
till her sisters, home again, though scarred,

wiped thistled feather from her skin. Elsewhere,
a sinister, skinless bride awaited groom at altar.

Brenda Mann Hammack is an Assistant Professor at Fayetteville State University where she teaches seminars in children's literature, Gothic literature, and contemporary poetry. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals including Mudlark, Heliotrope, Pedestal, Word Riot, The Hurricane Review, The Laurel Review, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Opium, and The North Carolina Literary Review. Her article on Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire is forthcoming in a special edition of SEL, which focuses on Victorian Hybridity.