A Power Doctor
by Sharon Hoffman
Do you keep losing jobs?
Do you keep losing love –
you who wouldn't know what to do with love
if it arrived on your porch with flowers and a box of chocolates?
Has someone put a spell on you?
And roots, too?
Maybe you ought to pay somebody
to navigate the map etched on your palm.
Maybe you ought to find a mojo man,
a two-head,
a power doctor.
Maybe you ought to sit down,
just sit down,
and listen to this.
The year I turned thirteen,
my mother bought a battered wingback chair
at a junk store on Highway 17
just east of Walterboro.
When she removed the batting,
she discovered something
hidden deep within the back.
No, not Confederate silver,
not century bonds,
but a little bag, a circle of red cloth
tied up with thread, blue
as the vein at your wrist.
Inside, we found a dime
with a hole drilled through it,
a ring small enough to fit
a baby’s smallest finger,
a yellow powder that smelled of medicine
and made you itch,
and bindweed root.
Somebody heard the story
and sent her to a man
who knew what it was:
the power to make love come,
bidden or unbidden.
The man stood behind her
with his hands on her temples
for the longest time.
She told me she could hear him breathing,
softly and evenly, the way you do
when you’re dreaming something so sweet
you don’t want to wake up ever.
My mother said he murmured,
“Yes, I'll tell her.”
He took the charm
and showed her
how to tie it up again,
what words to say
to bind the spell.
I think that there was more
she didn't tell me.
When she came home,
she set the chair
in the middle of the room.
She stripped it down
till its ribs caged empty air.
She smoothed and stained the legs,
she blanketed the frame,
she nestled the charm
in its deepest core.
She said some words and repeated them.
She draped the chair in cloth
the color of a mustard seed.
You ask me, “What exactly is the color of a mustard seed?”
The color of the chair in which you are sitting now.
Sharon Weightman Hoffmann is a writer based in Atlantic Beach, Florida. Publications include The Hooghly Review, New York Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives (Harvard University Press), Isle of Flowers (Anhinga Press), South Florida Poetry Journal, Letters, Poetica, Wild Roof, Sho, Qu and other magazines. Awards include fellowships from Atlantic Center for the Arts and Florida’s Division of Cultural Affairs, and two Pushcart nominations.