Are your symptoms more at ease or is it hell?

[sovay]

My poem "Firebrands" is now online at Through the Gate. The title comes from a line attributed to Nicholas Noyes, an ancestral relation of my husband's and the officiating minister at the Salem witch trials: "What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there." He was speaking of Martha Corey, Mary Eastey, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Redd, Margaret Scott, and Samuel Wardell, Sr., all executed in September 1692. At the hanging of Sarah Good earlier that summer, he had famously urged her to confess and received the reply, "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink." He died of a throat hemorrhage, choking on his own blood. Nathaniel Hawthorne was so struck by the story, he put it into The House of Seven Gables (1851). When derspatchel and I were in Salem last spring, we talked about looking for Nicholas' grave, but we looked at the sea instead. It is pretty much the fault of Warlock (1989) that this poem exists at all.

The rest of the issue is small, but very sound. Go read all of them!

Comments

[sovay]

Oh HELLS YES, would be my reply to both of those.

Excellent.