Issuu

for Poetry&FeministFolklore

March2026

COVEN

Nottingham

KATE MACALISTER CREATOR IN

RESIDENCE

“Tobeawitchistoknowwords.Tobeawitchistoknow,inyourbones(your tiredbones),wherethewordwitchmightcomefrom.Birthstories,origin myths,arewanderingandplural, partial,butyours.” -SoMayer

When I began this residency, I imagined a series of workshops. What I did not fully anticipate was the community that would emerge. What started as a room of unfamiliar faces slowly became something far more alive. Each story shared was a spell for connection. Each voice brought its own texture, courage, and clarity. I witnessed strangers become brave in front of one another. I witnessed listening turn into a form of care. Over time, trust accumulated quietly but powerfully, until the space felt held not by one person, but by everyone in it. Truly a coven. Weaving words into something that archived our power, our vulnerabilty and our soft resistance. In COVEN we gathered the scattered bones of our stories and laid them out in the moonlight. What has been silenced and trimmed to be palatable is not dead;

it waits for the song that calls it back to life. With our poems, we return to connection with land, lineage, and each other. We remember the old paths to community. We feel the pulse under the soil. We come home to the stories that made us, and let them make us anew.

Within these pages you will meet witches such as the Night Hag, Perchta, Nicnevin, and Modron. Once cast as monsters or warnings, they reappear here as complex presences, ancestral echoes, reminders that power in women’s and genderqueer people’s hands has always been a source of healing.

You will also find spells. Practical incantations for moss, for change, for tending to our damaged earth and to one another.

Cover:JohnWilliamWaterhouse. CirceInvidiosa

hags

Not all these powers were imaginary. - Silvia Federici

for rescue, for salvation; they had come to her door

a salve for an uprising of the heart, a wild blackberry thorn snagged deep in the flesh a changeling child amort and faded. it was of little consequence when the fires were lit in her fields, forgotten who had sown and blessed the crops she attended every birth, muttering hands on every unyielding pubic bone, on every dying day, offerings between the worlds. she tended the orchard mother planted, a yielding orchard of heirloom apples and she still spoke to the bees,

ate from their mouths. then they came and they swallowed everything whole and she lay eagled, tied upon their preying tongues. in the light of the fire it was of no consequence

that the hearth was always lit, the doors open, that she made enough candles to laugh on a snow moon night; that they sat at her feet in the cinders that she had said a prayer for each of them, that she knew death was gentle like a milkgirl or a germinating sunflower seed. it did not matter

that her hands ploughed the earth (now salt), hands that dyed every silken wedding ribbon red, hands akin to hawthorn bark a wishing well to cradle. it was of little consequence that her hoarse gekkering was devotion, all gods here her witness. they thought nothing

of it, the women weeping, screaming, praying, cursing tangled into each other.

whispering in the square: when everything was taken we still kept each other.

Kate MacAlister

(Iamthewitchthat…)

I A M

ndependent

untie, niece-lover, cat-stroker

alleable is my nature

E H T W I T

H T H A T

ransgressing expectations

ealing histories hurts mbodying freedom

HazelWarren

isdom in every wrinkle

begin to understand onight we share tales

ollect our strength

ags and heroines

ogether we find belonging elp each other to thrive

lmost as if it were meant apestries woven in our stories we…

Found ourselves within the coven

Theycallme“Hag” ColletteColver

The winter chills my skin; my breath expelled in frosted puffs from between cracked, frozen lips. I walk on, purposefully, in my red boots and layers of heavy skirts. Broom in my hand.

Worms crawl deep beneath my footsteps. Crows caw in the moonlit evening. The branches scratch and catch in my knotted, unwashed hair.

I run a hand across a magnificent oak as I pass. Trace the veins in the frozen bark.

Everything teeming with life in the forest beyond the village. My connection with nature, surviving the cold.

An owl hoots a sudden warning, and I whip my head to my left as a rotting apple, hurled, hits me in the small of my back.

Three village lads, hatred flashing in their torch-lit eyes and beyond it, fear. “Hag!” they cry, laughing, before running back through the thicket towards the safety and mundanity of their homes.

But I am built from bruises. Every slight, every harsh word only fortifies my power. My knowing is untouched by violence.

I will likely soon tend to their fevers, hold the hands of their wives in childbirth, offer sleeping potions and relief from pain.

Until I too am amongst the worms. Hidden in my haggery, I can be free. Barefoot, grounded, and kind.

TheBloodyRebellion NikkiDisney

She croaches down

A defiant look on her face

She is here to bleed into the earth

The mothers move their children on in the park, hurrying past and averting eyes, this is not for public viewing…and yet

She howls

She releases

Rocking her hips from side to side

She sings into the earth

The ancient song of passing Honours the cycles of the seasons withing

The release is everything

No longer waste or byproducts

No longer a blue dye of the unseen

No longer hidden away

This blood of hers is blood of the earth, of the land, they are one….

She leaves, Splatters remaining

Adorning a snowdrop,

Soil fueled by the none birth; the life giving energy returning to the earth; awakening the spring.

I am the witch that is here to inspire and empower women to break the cycle of narcissistic abuse and toxic generational curses. A witch that helps women to reclaim their voice, em otional power, inner wisdom and their powerful ligh t.

Moving through the world with a mystical, courageou s confidence.

The witch that helps empaths to fiercely protect th eir energy and peace. Holding up the mirror and shining a loving light on wounds ready to be acknowledged and healed. Encouraging the black sheep to finally become the G OAT that they are. Who holds space for people to explore their inner w orld. Inviting an alien curiosity and compassion. The bridge between darkness and the light. Crumbling illusions and removing the veil. Hidden truths being brought into consciousness.

The witch who no longer seeks approval or validatio n. Hopeful of a new age on this earth. A force to the be reckoned with.

The witch who unapologetically embodies her weird a nd encourages others to do the same.

Jess Frost

Progress

Marjorie

Griffiths

It begins with a nightmare that doesn’t make sense: a combination of realities, uncertainties, unfamiliarities. The faceless unfaceables. The nameless unnameables. The self: parcelled up in thick packing paper with a strip of stickytape to stopper your screams.

When you wake and tear off the layers that held you hostage the raw skin beneath is a truth in itself.

Watch it harden into armour.

Spellsforchange: NikkiDisney

Connection and warmth (loving warmth) for all humans that can then expand to the earth and animals and trees and anima. I am not sure witch way round this needs to happen, but I know external connection is needed. Perhaps internal connection needs to lead in a forest, Deep rooted grounding into the earth. Down. Up. Out

Evocation AnnieColloby

In the moonlight of the silent hours

Body become momentarily

Trunk-like

Toes life-giving roots

Extend out into the Fractured Earth

Arms,

Take the form of branches

Stretching out into the Void of Denial

Connect physically with Mother Earth

May I feel the urgency of repair

Hear the courageous chanting of ancestors

Understand the intense love that fights

Feral like, for survival

Hold that knowledge Act upon it

Mybreath,itbecomesthebreeze

Recalling the circling

Leaf gatherer breeze

Around Another In awe

Of its dance

She stands

Her breath no longer

Obediently silent

Force exerting exhaled air

Gathering up

Each leaf

Watching as they dance around

Her bodily form

Feeling the embrace she is

Unapologetic

Rejuvenated Fierce

AnnieColloby

TheBreathingCircle

ShaneGabriel

Beneath the elder’s dark crown, the brook mutters in sparks. I bow to the fold of her shadowed hem.

Water threads quicksilver through root and stone. She is no meek timber but a hedge witch mother, her bark rune-marked, her sap thick with weather and will. When they bound me with names: wild, excessive and wrong, I laid those words in the cradle of her roots. She took them to marrow and returned them as ember.

The brook, her bright-boned daughter, unseats the granite fathers.

Inside their breathing circle, I loosen the tight seams of borrowed stories.

I rise leaf-lit, ash-marked, remembering my own becoming.

ProtectionSpelloftheBreathingCircle

Beneath the elder’s dark crown, I stand in her shade. Brook of bright sparks, circle me in your silver tongue. Root and stone, bind fast what seeks to harm.

Hedge witch mother, mark me in rune and bark.

Let your weathered sap seal my skin with will.

The names cast at me — wild, excessive, wrong — I return to the cradle of your ancient roots. Take them to marrow; send them back as ember.

Bright-boned water, unseat the granite fathers.

Within your breathing circle, stitch my story whole.

Leaf-lit, ash-marked, I rise under your keeping.

SpellforChange

I believe that I can pave the way forward. I belong to the earth and the sea. May my life be the bedrock for justice, May my words last long after me.

I will rise like the wave of resistance. I have to ﬁght the onslaught of hate. I hear the voices of the people before us, Singing “our lives are not up for debate”.

Please,Modron AlexPoole

Hold onto her for me, Modron. She passed into your embrace too soon. Let her roots run deep and ﬂowers bloom. May she know no more hardship. Ask the winds to be kind and the earth strong.

Help her grow, Modron. Though I did not birth her, she was mine. From one parent to another, I beg of you. Keep her safe. I am sure I will join you both soon.

TheNightHag NicolaRossall

She arrives with restless sleep. My body still, immobile. A vessel. A host. Thoughts spiral and then snag: shock, choking, chaos, silence, horror, that moment - The hum starts. Static.

Not in the room, it’s in me. Weight on my chest. Memory - pressure. Breathless. I want to move, my arm, my hand, even a finger. My body out of reach of my mind. You must have felt like this too. That day / this night: the need to gulp cool autumn air, to find the ground, to make the world hold still long enough to stand up in it. To go back to your life. To return. You’re gone and the scene keeps replaying. It happens behind my eyes. It happens in my throat. The ending doesn’t change. You don’t come back in any version. The ending doesn’t change. The night hag is with me and you no longer are. Or she is what’s left when you aren’t. She hears the animal noises that come from me, the thoughts I can’t say aloud because saying them crushes my chest. In the darkest, stillest moments she stays. She pins me to the bed. She keeps me from running. Not kindly. Not cruelly. A witness: her cold, sharp fingers holding me still while my loss replays.

TheNightHag JessFrost

It begins with a nightmare.

You feel her presence looming.

A darkness cloaking your entirety.

Your lungs fill with grief, your heart remaining armoured.

Your skin screaming from the wounds of a thousand daggers.

Your heart heavy with a thousand betrayals.

You take a knowing breath.

A voice whispers deep in your soul.

She isn’t here to torture; she is here to help you heal.

The paralysis a necessary pause.

The shadow aid for you to finally embody the courage to feel and thaw.

To balance your inner power of light and dark.

To finally let go of the generational burdens you have carried for lifetimes.

It is time.

With her darkness you find your light again.

You can breathe a little deeper.

You can love a little harder.

You can speak a little louder.

You can live a little fuller.

TheNightHag:Job#386-1222

HollieChapman

It begins with a nightmare: a spiked shell lodged deep in heart and mind and gut.

Grief. It lingers in the atriums of the heart. Sticks in the throat like a chicken bone. Lies in wait to remind you they are gone.

With dextrous talons I ease grief from the body, spool its threads, snip the ends clean, soothe weeping sores with lavender, calathea, lemon balm.

It will take many nights to cleanse.

For now, I rise, the vial in my clasp brimming with hope.

TheNightHag

HazelWarren

DressTheWell

Sit by the river and breathe in its fumes, Tar your lungs in grey waste, Taste the sting of its sulfur-scythe.

Soak a clay-canvas in the current, And watch it murk through plastic silt.

EmmaBirdie

Sewage baptism. Once thoroughly greed-soiled, Dredge the canvas up, and carefully imprint the mud.

Mosaic a simple water-vision Of bracken-burs and eager ferns, Of tanned eggshells and sugar-sand.

Stitch together kissing petals and rattling seeds, Shivering wool and rowan leaves. Make this offering into the shape

Of Greenteeth, Madron, Nicnevin, Or somebody we’ve forgotten altogether.

Reckon with what we’ve done to the water, And dress the well.

NightMare

It begins with my bed becoming a spinal board, my limbs become calcified, and my chest becomes a saddle which the night mare straddles. Her knees nestle into the sweat of my armpits, her thighs bookend-brace my waist. She places two pieces of stone, slate and shale, over each eyelid made leaden. Then she bends to put her cheek to mine, and we rest like rocks buried beneath water. She breathes me in. In a thousand years, or no time at all, she takes each eyelid stone into her mouth and swallows them whole.

ox Migration F AlexPoole

On the run from hunters with guns.

I miss the smell of wet earth. Morning dew tastes sour in the city.

I wait for the early hours Until I can hunt again. They shifted from woodland to concrete, Like the spirits of their ancestors. Adapt and survive.

Copper furs hide in shadow, Too scared from past encounters To run free

FOUNDBONES

Sheep’s vertebrate exiled on the shore/ stranded between pebbles/ forlorn wash-up

Bone-white face of a sea dragon/ a bird pelvis I’m told/ glimpsed in knee-high waves

Skull of a foxcub little teeth bared/ rotting poison beneath brambles/ rescued from the forgotten

CATKIN/LARK/NEWT

Catkin yellow, catkin ﬂuffball

Hanging from the hazel & the goat willow

Whispering spring and calling the bumblebees home

KirstyFox

Skylark rising on soft air currents

A song & dance for the summer

Calling back to our long walks in the golden hour light

Baby newt, an eft, hiding in the compost bag

Trying to ﬁnd the soft wetness of shade

Away from the heatwave, she wriggles down to be hidden

EXTINCTION/REGENERATION

I hear the voices of those lost to us

sea cow

thylacine

passenger pigeon

aurochs

great auk pyrenean ibex

splendid poison frog

slender-billed curlew moorean viviparous tree snail

singing for something we don’t yet know how to make but I’m hopeful we will learn

SongofConnection

Drop down

Deep down into the earth

Rise up

High up to meet the sky

Breath out

Exhale and live with love

Find truth

Fight power and be as one

Trust land

Connect and hold to the ground (REPEAT)

KirstyFox

Nikki Disney

TheHillsAreBreathing Alex

I have been carved. Grown over.

Stuck. And bled. But I still breathe. You breathe me in And I let it be.

Because I have more to me Than you will ever take. So I rumble. I rattle. I shake. More than I used to.

Yet I still house the birds, And the trees, And, now, the people. Yes, You.

Tiny, insatiable you. Who marvel at my beauty And try to capture it. Put it in a box and sell it.

Confined or bought. Only burned. And there is too much rain.

So, yes, I allow you.

I Allow You.

And, one day, You will be Grown over too. And I shall still breathe.

Poole

Panther

SarahNoon

ifiwereapanther

LaLobaDance: NikkiDisney

I rise in flames

Stomping and humming

Releasing the binds that held me down

Breaking through the shackles and the earth

I grow

Expand up

The stillness

Letting the energy pullsate

Letting the vibrations crescendo

Deep deep down the energy flows

To the core

She sings back

“Go run be free child of the earth”

And with that I run through my heart

Forward propelled

Breath fast

Squeals released from the top of my head

I begin to fly, to soar

I can see it all

The world shrinks

I grow and release

And release and grow

Nicnevin

I do not enter, I am intertwined.

Nicnevin in a gown of moss embroidered with ferns.

Roots weathered, clinging to tumbled rocks on the Atlantic edge.

Oak limbs tangle, embrace.

Lichen hangs from bark skin like slow ﬁre.

The air half-breath, half-mist.

Witch.

Queen.

Of forests, hills, streams.

Peat dark eyes seeing, mycelium sensing.

Feral, ungoverned, abundant. Memories held in tree rings.

My paths hidden from those who take.

I tread gently.

Breathe in the damp forest air, Let fronds and leaves touch my fragile skin.

I pass like the rain.

Let the bracken grow and the mist in. I rewild myself, let endings feed beginnings.

NicolaRossall

Lilacs out of the Dead Land

Careese Hutchinson

TheFeastoftheThreeKings:Perchta’sGift

On Winter nights, she hones her blade, the whetstone slick in forest glade. She bids you join her, hungry child: a soft voice in the darkling wild.

The shadows call like Mother’s voice. You follow them; you have no choice. In their embrace, you know you’re safe, you wandering soul, you hungry waif.

You know the full are not her due, their bellies tight with hearty stew; she counts them safe and lets them be, to end your need most tenderly.

A fire burns across your gut and out now pours a gushing glut of entrails from the gaping maw she’s ripped into your empty core.

She fills you up with straw and stones, with shards of glass and pigeon bones, with dust and soot and Autumn leaves, and wheaten chaﬀ from harvest’s sheaves.

You will never feel hunger again.

A soft voice in the darkling wild, she bids you join her, hungry child. The whetstone slick in forest glade, on Winter nights, she hones her blade,

MarjorieGriffiths

I am guardian of the rivers, of all the land, but t his patch of pebbles and puddles too.

Unsteady underfoot, you skid, clutching your sweet son's hand.

The lure of the filthy water calls to him like a si ren song. You hold him tighter, see his excitement.

‘His shoes are all wrong for this’ you think. You scan for the movement of cars; a flash of metal, as his hand releases.

You watch his joy, and I am here with my hand upon y our shoulder. As he jumps, and he jumps, stones scattering and mu d water soaking his trouser legs.

I stand with you mother. Solidarity with the care y ou offer.

Modron:Amodern protectionspell

“Just remember,” I whisper softly.

The sound of my voice is just the breeze across the grassy scrubland.

“Send this love inward too”.

Collette Colver

Bythelightofthemoon

PerchtatheBellyslitter NikkiDisney

I sharpen my blade, ready to take to the skies to find those wracked with hunger and despair; it must be sharp to lessen the pain, slide through the flesh, reduce the bleed. I disinfect the rags by boiling them in the pure water of the stream.

A shadow calls to me across the sky, it is time to ride. I pull myself upright, aching bones and hollow eyes. I turn off….to heal I must cause pain….The world is empty and I have nowt to fill it other than riches of rags to feed the empty bellies of the earth. My call is not to the castle but to the land.

A fire burns within. I must quell it for this mission, but the injustice burns my insides and singes my heart. I see the wealth and abundance; the starvation and pain and I can do little about it, only offer a moment of ease…to fill up in other ways and take the cries of the children away from mothers ears.

The wilderness speaks through me. The wind calls me in. I begin my journey to viciously heal the bellies of the poor, to allow them for this winter at least, to want less.

By the light of the moon I land and offer a quick slit through the soft belly flesh. I fill the space with rags so one pain is removed. Hunger is no more and these babes will sleep tonight.

thelightofthemoon…

ColletteColver

Frau Holle hitches her wagon and settles in for the night.

The souls of the dead cluster close to her for warmth. Gold jingles in the pockets of her heavy winter coat.

A shadow calls to her across the fields – witches waiting for her arrival – to join the procession of the dead. She welcomes her sisters. Her thoughts are of eiderdowns and first snow.

Frau Holle senses the slowing heartbeats of hibernating creatures, longs to join them, but there is much work to be done.

A fire burns within as she arrives at her liminal space. The wagon now at rest she slips through the chilly waters of the well to the other place, she is warmed by her instincts and intent.

The gold has made the journey too; it will be passed palm to palm with one in need.

The wilderness speaks. Lush foliage here and such plenty. Why would a girl ever wish to return home to hardship and invisibility?

By the light of the moon Frau Holle cups the face of the young girl who has passed through in need of guidance, her hands are coarse from spinning, her eyes bright with hope.

LeahJoyce

Darkness, Tranquil,blindingdarkness

Saveforhergentlekisses

Glinting,revelling

Amongtheebonyveinsofthewaves.

Silence, Cradledbythetide’srhythm, Amesmerisinghymn, Playedbyinvisible, Invincible,delicatehands. Mybodyyieldstothemelody, Inolongerholdcommand.

Containment K.Attenborough

Tearing,shiftingskin

aguisetoholdwhat'swithin ragesplitandroiling

Pudermotte

thewanderingdunescollapse particles into universal patterns

high entropy a whole spectrum contracting around a node:

perfect ﬂower

Joline-SophieKlein

ears curl into themselves on a bed of pine needles under ﬂoodlights

chewing the sound of candles blown out at a kids’ birthday party cosmic maw and deafening

big cat moving through the underbrush

moving sticky like resin the sound of your tongue on the roof of my mouth

soft palate

bruised fruit the sound of your Adam’s apple under my teeth

strange bones grown familiar molars blunted

masticated

slow like sublingual inner & other ways of knowing up from down

ﬂuid caverns:

pressure elevation position in space

rippling across membrane resonating drumming machinery

spokes of a wheel moving viscous spit and phlegm

hair melts into your temples

the texture of my touch

waiting to burst

do you recognise it by sound alone?

the sound when pulling it up from the marrow witchthing, shrivelled with calloused knuckles toc

trailing fur soft to taste toc

like overgrowth like viscera

solidiﬁed iron teeth hammered metal sinking the sound of treading the wheel

blade on the whetstone enduring

amber

standstill paws on pine needles muscles taut restraint.

TheGift

Out of control - a lack of discipline, Rolling out of and around Clothes I should fit into. Comparison. Always. An overhang that's speaks to A lesser mindset. A lesser worth. A lesser person.

CharlotteThomas

My parents did not see this Looking upon my tiny body, Amnio-caked and blood-coated, Skull triangulated by hours of animal labour. My mother's lowing does not deserve this warped vision Of what she brought forth.

The body that bleeds forth Clotted and clogged Is more than the shame it invites.

The idea of an apron intrigues me. Yes, it hangs from my waist, But it's not to restrict me Or to pin me into a mothering role, Baking pies I don't get to eat.

This beautiful expanse shows I've made my own cake And eaten it tooI think that's what scares you.

A bigger body is already provided for - It does not need you.

Full and generous and weatherbeaten, It deserves more than my Diminution

Excuses

Sorry-am-I-taking-up-too-much-roomses.

My body is my gift.

I'll share it with you, If you've got the appetite.

SheHasDeepRoots JessOsborne

She has deep roots, strong bones and iron teeth.

She stands, patient, at crossroads where maidens weep.

She cracks tall mountains with lightning strike.

She sees the bleeding unmother through the night.

She spins bright wool and violent thread.

She weaves shrouds to bind the unquiet dead.

She leads night’s mare by the bridle.

She finds good work for hands left idle.

She sets the bones and brews the beer.

She winds the seasons through the year.

She smears ungrateful men beneath her boots.

She has iron teeth, strong bones, and deep roots.

TheFinalSpell JulieGardner

Lay me out on common land where purple heather grows, between the mountains and the town where Taff and Rhondda ﬂow, Lay me out upon the ground, let my breath blow free, let my blood sink to the earth and ﬂow towards the sea. The Great Welsh Mother, Modron, a quiet presence there, will hear your words, will know your thoughts, will hold you in her care. Place me near the rocking stone, chant the poems and spells, our ancestors are listening and you must bid farewell.

Brittle bones and wrinkled skin, eyes and ears and tongue, liver, kidneys, bladder, spleen, brain and heart and lungs, cervix, endometrium, two fallopian tubes, vagina, hymen, clitoris, pear-shaped, shrunken womb. This body held and nourished me, gave my spirit home, so leave it here with gratitude. I am where I belong.