“In Rachael Ikins’ A Handbook for Alchemists, one finds and follows a challenging fascinating character, warts and all. She is not nice, she is not even always good—but she is always interesting. “

Jennifer Maloney, author of Evidence of Fire, Poems and Stories and Don’t Let God Know You Are Singing, Poems and Stories

The Witch in Hansel and Gretel Speaks

Chupacabra Sunday, 

light gives way to Morpheus’s smoke. 
Everything you left out there wants to come back in. 
Whispers a poem of cigarettes and efficiency.

She treads water, clears her nostrils 
from the waves. Whispers.
Things below crave her legs. Soon the claws.

Floating mummies’ perfect, flared 
skirts and shouting joy, wrapped, folded,  
genitals exposed. Bob around her head.

She picks one between two fingers, 
lights it, tokes. In the covered dawn a voice wails.

Is it the sound of night caught 
late-collecting rabbits? Fox lust?
Not despair’s ragged tone, 
exclamation, poem breaking free 
of the teeth that gripped it by the neck

rising to join everything you left out there
 under the trees that wants back in. Chupacabra 
scratches the door let me let me let me in

the wolf, that children’s fable 
about the intelligence of pigs. 
Bacon crunched between your molars 
as succulent as a back strap of toddler, 
roasting wreathed by 

Morpheus’s smoke at the edge of the lake 
where she is treading water where she whispers 
around her cigarette about the efficiency of rotisserie 
where her mouth puckers, sucks splinters of bone. 

You walk that beach one morning, 
a child’s untied shoe steps out of mud.

-Rachael Ikins, from A Handbook for Alchemists

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A Handbook for Alchemists is a thrilling knee-skinning read. Ikin conjures a spirit world where as magi she stalks her memories and recollections fiercely and unapologetically. I could quote until every drop of this book is spent, but I shall leave you to discover her landscape yourself, because as you do, you will be salivating at her use of words, each one under her spell. She is truly a wordsmith but beyond that, deeply real and at the same time, mystical in her proffering. I walk into wonderland with every turn, astounded at how she can weave her magic always a step ahead, surprising and utterly original.

Candice Louisa Daquin
Senior Editor, Indie Blu(e) Publishing & Editor, Raw Earth Ink

Mirror mirror

Wake to pounding.
Wrong color hair, burned souls, 
feet of wind-chime slice restlessness, 
crying blades. Dash across fields, leaves 
slapping poems to the souls of your feet. 

Venus sees no reflection.
Canines carved of baby bone, tongue 
to suck poetry from the earth and yes, 
there is that maple tree squealing, vampire.

Last time someone asked what you wanted? 
1982.  Teethful smiles, anxiety’s metal tang, 
today you ask yourself.
                          *****
You lift your hair, shocked at what your eyebrows 
have been up to, beckon your father onto your pillow.
He offers advice. 
You pick at spines of all the cacti you embraced 
the past three days, barrels and bushels, upstairs 
with coyote  knee, fangs painlessly 
infiltrated your  thin teeshirt 

into your breasts. 
What have you become!

Why did your father, buried since ‘81 chisel 
through sinus pain, 3D and red as concrete, 
scare you awake with his words 
Why don’t you?

You loved your father 

even after they drove a stake 
through his heart, 
even when you wore a garlic 
necklace 

to kiss him goodbye 
when he drove away at 4 a.m. 
in a white Ford pick-up,
his face invisible 
in any of its mirrors.

-Rachael Ikins, from A Handbook for Alchemists

A Handbook for Alchemists is a full-length poetry collection. Written from the point of view of the witch in any fairy tale—the witch never gets attention, it’s always the princesses—we see her as a regular soul. She struggles with her bad habits, smoking, eating toddler, she loves her pet pig and is friends with the crows in the woods. Her taste in lovers is rather sketchy, she still has mother issues— who among us doesn’t? And eventually, she has to wrestle with her own mortality and make peace with it. 

To purchase signed copies of A Handbook for Alchemists, email Rachael. She accepts  PayPal, Venmo, checks. Copies can also be purchased directly from Cyberwit Publications, Amazon.com, and other major online book retailers.

Rachael Ikins is a 2016/18 Pushcart, 2013/18 CNY Book Award nominee, 2018 Independent Book Award winner, & 2019 Vinnie Ream & Faulkner poetry finalist.  2021 Best of the Net nominee, 2023 2nd place winner Northwind Writing Competition. Author/illustrator of nine books in multiple genres. Her writing and artwork have appeared in journals world wide from India, UK, Japan, Canada and US. 

“I absolutely love your book. I couldn’t put it down until I read it cover to cover.”

Sharon Knutson author of My Grandfather is a Cowboy, poems and , editor of The Storyteller Poetry Review