Two from Tama Cathers
Underworld Trips for 39 Dollars
Many think of witches as scary,
and wise women as calm;
but they are cut from the same cloth.
Perhaps one is new, fresh with harshness,
while the other is oak-barrel-aged mellow.
The witch, while she may be cheap white tequila,
knows the way to the underworld.
She'll take you down on a tour:
for $39 per person, she can
show you the scary, the dark,
and the wild.
You're not likely to die,
and will return with a story,
but your life—unchanged.
The wise woman is old cognac, bottle mostly empty.
She walks paths
knowing the ways of the underworld,
the friends and the medicine.
She goes because she goes.
Even without you, she goes
She feeds the moon moth and fairy lights,
On foxfire, smuggled moonlight, and moxy.
In the dark, she goes
to sit with the knurled trees
as they leak black ink, while they mourn.
She goes to the cave that bleeds
never-ending dark into the night.
She offers it her plain black stone,
which she'll bring back home;
dark and still bleeding.
If you are stuck in the upper world
In a nightmare, or stuck half-below,
rather than point and call her scary—
call to her,
so she might find and deliver you home.
The Wolf Queen
I am the Wolf Queen,
who teaches her cubs these lessons.
She, who frightens her young
into their senses—
so they do not roll
mindlessly,
through the clearing,
tumbling
to lie
feet up,
panting, and giddy with pleasure,
as the badger circles in the shadows.
Tama Cathers is a poet whose work explores transformation, descent, and the absurd conversations that happen in liminal spaces. Her background in field biology and veterinary medicine brings observational precision to poetry that threads between the physical and mystical. She has worked studying crocodiles, black bears, and red wolves. Her poems appear in The Cereal City Review, the Westminster Arts Festival, and she was a runner-up in the 2025 Ned Foskey Poetry Contest. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
