They call her the Beldame of Brocker Lane,
but she’s not a witch, nor ugly,
she’s just not like the rest of them,
and they can’t abide differences.
She spends her days peering through a microscope,
studying the animacules that no one notices,
cataloguing morsels of every little thing,
naming each one like children.
When she realizes the delivery driver
is the same every week,
she tries to make small talk,
his blush more incarnadine than her own.
She wants to know more about him,
but she’s not good at asking questions of people.
She studies the motes he leaves behind
and finds the essence of him.
It’s a funny little courtship,
and she wonders what they’ll call him,
when he ends all his delivery runs
at their home on Brocker Lane.
Dawn Vogel writes fiction and poetry in a variety of genres. By day, she edits reports for historians and archaeologists. In her alleged spare time, she runs a craft business, co-edits Mad Scientist Journal, and tries to find time for writing. Her steampunk adventure series, Brass and Glass, is available from DefCon One Publishing. She is a member of Broad Universe, SFWA, and Codex Writers. She lives in Seattle with her husband, author Jeremy Zimmerman, and their herd of cats. Visit her at http://historythatneverwas.com or on Twitter @historyneverwas.
Photo by jesse ramirez on Unsplash
Creator Spotlight:
Dawn Vogel
Author of “Motes and Morsels”
What inspired you to write this poem?
I’m part of an online writing community, and several of the poets participate in a weekly challenge where one member posts prompts, and we all draft poems in response. The prompt I used for this poem was a list of unusual words, and the specific challenge was to see how many words we could use without having to explain them, but allowing their meaning to be gleaned from context. Beldame, animacules, and incarnadine were all on that list.
What do you hope readers take from this poem?
That love can appear in the strangest of places.
To give other writers hope, would you mind sharing with us how many edits and/or submissions this story/poem has been through?
The poem was written and lightly edited, then submitted. The acceptance was on the poem’s seventh submission and was edited again before publication.
Recommend something to us! This could be a book, a short story, a video game, a project you’ve heard about, something you’re working on, etc. Anything that has you excited and that you want people to know about.
Right now, I’m super excited to start incorporating beta reader feedback into my work-in-progress novel, which is a young adult urban fantasy novel set at a boarding school for supernatural teenagers.
