So you have issues with independent,
hairy girls? What’s this crap about her not
being “made for any man”? what blatant
douchebag talks like that these days? If you thought
all her dark craft was picked up second hand,
lifted from a Grimm’s tale, then you don’t know
jack. I bet you can’t even find Lapland
on a map. She’s a Northern Lights girl; snow
and ice do not vex her soul; polar bear
spirits love her. As a shaman she’s seen
worlds you can not even dream of. The air
is her home. She is lusty and obscene.
I am amazed that she did not castrate
you on the spot. You make a wretched mate.

* * *

I wrote this poem in response to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Witch-Wife,” (1917) where she lists all the reasons why having a witch as a spouse might, as the kids say, “suck dead bunnies through a straw.” The reasons she gives are terrible (what does “her voice is a string of colored beads” even mean?). Besides describing a “man of his times,” (i.e., racist and sexist) it is hard to imagine why anyone would consent to marry an ass so out of touch and hostile to their own mate as the narrator of the poem is.

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.