Witch Writing

I
The inside out
Changing person
Other voices
Comfortable knowing
This discussion doesn’t end but continues
throughout writing
Interwoven like the knitted “Habiba” sweater woven by Nargis in 1985. Marginalized no more
Writing, an action, a rebellion against those with the power saying
to you, “I am free”
My words are no longer hidden. They are bursting and blurting out, “No more. Never again!” The wild woman is loose.
Yes, stories, not ethnographies.
Not literary works, stories – my stories.
Nothing more than a storyteller. True context and author-ity. Identity never only body & emotions. Identity, mind. Not womanly?
I philosophize, write, calculate and debate.
And I cook, clean
But rarely inspire or enchant. I am woman.
Refuse to be a domestician. Revoke my privacy. Deny my partiality. Invoke my wholeness. Exhilarated
I yell. I scream. Do not whisper anymore. Do not apologize. Or hesitate. I shout.
I write. Make mistakes.
Make up grammar. And words. Language unacademic. Not traditional or standard.
My grammar – Partly third generation Holocaust survivor
Daughter of immigrants
Sufi-Muslim commune member. Wife of a non-English speaker
I am not writer. But I will write. Not in a dilemma. In an impasse to express this raging and psychotic voice.
Awaiting excavation
All journals waiting for this? I am excavating you, my journal. Digging up your relics.
Dusting off the grains of sand. Using a toothbrush to clean the obscure crevices
I will shine you. But keep you in your original form. Unchanged, but unburied. Full of luster.
Since my memory is soft. I resort to you who does not forget. Your voice does not change. You are constant. Some say trivial. You are truth
For that day, that moment. The only truth I will ever touch.
Thinking is not better. Doing is no less. Day-to-day is my record. My social-constructionist life. Not square, but circular. A confession and a daily log.
You are flexible.
Always there. Transactional language
No end, beginnings.
With bumps, holes and rainbows. Being close to the self and exploratory. More beautiful and endearing.
Exploration making us alike. Conveying information setting us apart. A marginalizing technique. No end, know no right, simply exploring. Organic and living. Writing dead?
Didn’t work it out before telling it?
Dynamic. Not a dead thing. Dare you call my process dead! Going on a personal trip. Chronicled by letters
Language participates
An action. Not serving all equally. It is separatist. Exclusionary
Sometimes silent.
Discursive and judgmental. Can be empirical and analytical
Holes of silence
Abuse. You can be found. Silenced journals are actions, quieted.
Peek-a-boo, I found you.
Abuse, my bleached mark, worn on my shirt.
My workings. Cleaning laundry slave shirt.
In a cornfield. Must go on. Lost, no. Moving, yes. A destination, no.
Exploring. Submissive to my polarity. Alienated by fissures and gaps. Darkness and height. The realm of imaginary, the semiotic.
Exotic, but cold.
Genetically human.
Not like your mother
Eyes or hair unlike your mother. That adorable, tiny nose – not mine.
Beautiful brown, velvety skin. Has to be your dad’s. Sharp wit and brains. No, no, no
Not from a woman
You, autonomous and separate.
My mother’s voice, My grandmother’s
And slaughtered great-grandmother’s voice
Share linguistic intimacy.
Highly controversial
Must tell the truth
Engendered by macropolitics
Male dominance
And explicit sanctions
Not accepting, endorsing or accommodating
But revolting.
Mute, no more.
My language poisoned by my germy spit.
Inaccurate in your murderous mind.
Your patriarchal palace.
Made of symbols and signs. Falsifying my counterfeit words
My phallic serpent tongue. Muted groups
Dominant groups.
I encode.
You articulate.
I speak through.
You speak to.
You generating rules.
I follow. I do.
Accommodating your he-man. You human, me girl. Me a she. A generic man. An attractive primate.
A woman, a label, title and descriptor. Even a whore, mistress, courtesan, dame
You an animal, tiger
Me, a fruit – a red, purple and juicy pomegranate
Made of perfectly fitted-pieces.
I am Miss, Ms. or Mrs.
You, a Mr. Only one
Me, three. Always accommodating
Transitory words.
Lost in silence.
Thorny. With generated illegitimate odd meanings.
A lived experience of violence. Not represented, recorded
With enormous discrepancies
Validated today.

You belong to a language. It belongs to you. You are mankind
I am anonymous. An alien tongue. Unnamable. Alone
Restricted to the internal
Scrutinized by your authenticity.
You name.
I am named.
A purveyor, proprietor
A manufacturer of language. Never sanctioned, always strategizing against the powerless. Relegating my words,
Norming my behavior
Severely ensuing my category. My spherical bodily temple. A kingdom unto you
Instituting slavery, militaristic. Strengthened by your male dominance.
You, a legal entity.
I’m an injunction, hard to decipher. Disrespectful to you, your inscription – against me. Isolated by codes. Me, insignificant and inconclusive
Wavering and slow
Uttering nothings.
A human subject in your domain. Eve silenced by church and the public realm. A societal slave, preserved by a paradoxical memory.
Strongly prohibited from discourse.
Religion belonging to men. The ineffable source, symbolic of all things. Participating, teaching, baptizing
Woman, an exorcist.
Rebuked for healing, suppressed by groups.
But spiritual and filled with words.
My vengeance and dreadful hate against authorities having an inquisition against us bitches. Possessing esoteric speech burned into earth. Unintelligible and inarticulate. But ecstatic.
I’m your taboo, threatening. A linked phenomena. Your forbidden story, distanced by my confessions. My controversial will
Growing up female, informal and not confident. Delivering a monologue. Passionately throwing myself into expository prose. Without abilities.
Not able to acquire.
But pretty.
Standing on a platform
Committed to expansion
This love-hate. Risky, overbearing and unsuitable. I gossip
Quilt soft fabrics
Share vocabulary
In stereotypical fibers

Fascinated by trivial, weak and tentative speech. Speaking gibberish, in euphemisms. Littered wonders.
Charming, but not much to say. Decorative, void of wisdom or effectiveness
Not vivacious, or perfect
I am a chatterer, loquacious. A vacuum of ornamentation
Speaking separate. Etiquette. Demanding to be desirable. Chaste as Anne. But with an unstoppable mouth
Judged and named
Being imposed upon
By a distorted institution
Eloquent and honored
But a beast.
I’m irrational, not female or male.
An empire, shameless and enlarged
Conceptualized by boundaries
Gendered identity
Asymmetrical and approximate. Verbally weak. Not able to argue or recite. Patterned by routine. I am a preferred model. An interaction for which you subscribe.
Controlled by your status. Competing with your space.
Seizing your vivid sample. I’m barely audible, Structureless
An interrupted ghost
Violating and interrupting your constant. Stewed by the word fuck. Volleying this hierarchy. Single-sex discourse. Drugs and coffee. A stable dominant order.
In a pressure cooker
Inexpressive & limited
With firm boundaries
And masculine personalities. With consequences for destruction. Assaulted by power and prestige
An image of strength.
Ding . Accommodating to be invisible, but omnipresent. Domestically engineered
X
Vis-à-vis shit. Unequal distributions. Perennial weeds. Collaborated but in consensus. Challenging feminisms, fundamentalism, ism
Coordinating highly skilled players
In critical socialness
Maintained by woman-work. The engineer of the kitchen. Scrubbing dried egg whites from stainless steel pots
Fighting against fading black dye. Combating the grayness of once bright-sallow. Using my complex skills
I am an appearance.
I sit. I listen.
I know how to converse.

I can demonstrate weakness and cooperate.
I am a great sustainer
Accommodating your conversations.
Monitoring your richness
Mounted on a cross
Competing for leadership with alternative values
In your omniscient presence. Anecdotal in my speech. A psychosexual. Actively listening. By nodding, gesturing, guessing even bragging. Demanding attention.
I am girl
Making lots of noise
Rarely interrupted by your unengaging comments. A compelling illusion
Analytical and protestant. Not excusing, denigrated no more. Interest emerged in spheres. Coming into focus. Becoming real
Relieved by the body
Split open. A spot
Symmetrical and sacrificed. Located in layers of mutation
Not reported by the universal radical
Never convicted
Victims of coercion shattered by betrayal
Fragmented and disassociated
Gapping in blood
Lies unwrapped, realities forced Precisely common, a perpetrator
Conspiring judges acting seductively. This rare pathology explained by ill falsity. By external and internal festering by coping. Proprietary mechanisms. Verbally coerced, sexually abused *
God
*
This massive silence surrounding me Insidious in your presence. Pervasively unwittingly lying.
Confusion—faltering, fragmentation and indifference. Black without a music sheet
Not a heroine.
Quarrelling with this masquerade. Massacred with poet dreads, forbidden stories
With glory, fascinating and frenetic. A critic, artist, survivor. Multileveled consequences, muted perceptions suppressed by unpublished laws
Succinctly separated
Designed with contention. Circulated and published. Reviewed by colloquialisms, artificial classifications
Bureaucratically advanced with insightful vernaculars
Schooled by the uneducable
Illiterate and barred from education. Basic tools of numbering
Unable to create permanency. No recorded compositions.
Lullabied to sleep
Maxims and jokes, by a creator needing validation. An aberrant role with facilitated access. A natural service for a counterpart
Sacrificed energies – toiling, spasmodic
Half.
A room of my own
Prevented and discouraged from writing. Of obstacles
Writing. Aristocratic and learned. For a price.
The semblance of a woman. With noble efforts, marked with trends. And large traditions. Historical flukes. Circulating the process. Aiding and abetting. Again and again. Era
Initials, not only a period.
A mad and scribbling woman, ameliorated over time. Leaps
Phrases coined.
Persuasively arguing against prejudice and contempt. Classically public and incorrect, full of faults. Hiding in letter, thwarted head-on
Orally apologizing

Strictly native,
Lyrical and medieval
Damned by my sins
Mandated by religion
Moral treatises
Between literate boundaries. Protesting childbirth. And granted access. Denied education. Useless and ugly. Lamented by sitting. Presumptuous. Inadequacy. A cartoon character, styled vernacular. Techniques garnered. Signs everywhere. A grieving packet of papers. Killed by cancer. Enshrined in humor. Following vignettes of gender dynamic.
Striking the text
Noisy and intrusive
Undisclosed by hostile presence. Obvious but not minor. A puritan
Traced in exploration
Modernly generated in murky ponds. Dramatically increasing in prototypes. Akin to damned supplemental maps. Vacated and vacant. By the Father
Dramatically intellectual
A photographical genre,
Imprinted being. Apogee. An intriguing carrier perfected by days. Emulated by dis- tinguished predecessors
Technically Victorian, restored by exploits.
Partially written in shorthand. Missing publication. Smut and smuggle excluded
Descriptive and prescriptive criteria
Modicums of leisure
Highly improbable and never fully developed.
Inscribed by the crucible
An anomalous case on not real work. Poorly duplicated, courted by incident. Included in war. Sickness, despair and death.
Trivialized by priv-atization. Self contained and artful. Frivolous in canons. Archived in value. Destroyed parts
Edited beyond re-cognition. Volumes of discretion. In the custody of copying
Social histories. In a ranting world. With antagonism and irony.
MURDER HER
Cover her in fig leaves.
Burn her affairs. Aging daughter, “I have played a pernicious role.” Candid in commentary, my alma mater. For one hundred years. Leather bound and shackled. Suspected serials, status quo. Safely revered, granted permission
An uncommon occurrence of good luck,
Centuries of kismet
Manifested in complex naturalism. Proving moral and spiritual synthesis. A maidenhood and organization of red and white roses. Musked with Amber.
In accordance with intellectual tasks. Allowed for creation, confirmation. Wildly wild. Functioning with flair. Reproached with restraint. Disturbed by howling coyotes, Battling bobcats
Pleasing my husband in observant grace. Marriage silences.
Counting blessings, cautioning vigilance
Recording wishes
Leisurely inducing sweet and delightful walks. Boarding schools in the sea
Chronicled by cobalt
Detailing exquisite deaths. Recording affirmed births
Haunted lovers
Descendents of formulated material
Sketched then stretched on company sand. Not estimated by pleasures
But esteemed by networks . Affiliated bonds of migration
In the tavernous wilderness. Parsi-monious. Steeped in a steeple. Showering on a mountain. A politically comprised place. Marked and mediated
An occasional visitor
Ruptured and oozing

Not an artist. Or writer. Not a poet. Unspeak-able in cathartic conflict
Disappointments. Of mysterious ideas. Care-fully passing. Out-wardly deprived.
Healed, cooped up
With white saliva. In a zone. Moon glow
Enormous. Washed up in aquatic dollars. Illusions. Not fully aware. At the invisible
Inherited assumptions.
Fluently consoling my textuality. Sexuality
My short breathe.
Haphazard prose
Muck. Uniforms of class. Sport play
Events touching
Finished possibilities
Hardened mists
In midst. Amnesty of worry. Stop smiling
Be serious. Unanswer my questions. Both lips spread apart. Releasing liquid. Disclosing members. A self-induced picnic. A hair
Curly & brown.
Commented on by men
Generally pressured. An uncanny resemblance.
To an echo. An adulatory notebook
Negotiating real and reunion. Cup of Bengali tea. Remarkably connected to difficult times. Documented growth, wasted theories
Metaphors of fertility
Luxurious poetry.
Surfaced in a fishing net
Discomforted know-ledge. Overly rare climbing habits
Public logs.
Passages of per-formance. Pandora’s box. Peering inside
Directed knowing
Evidence of the ephemeral. Silly human woes. Polemical rhetoric. Multicultural pedagogy. Aloofness of molded mounds. A translational aggression
Desensitized by tied sittings. Merited in melancholy. Excerpts of campaigns. Super-lative discussions
Capacious renderings
Minimal democracy
Yes, I am convinced
I can actively piece together the shreds of my life. Certainly the threads. Beginning then abruptly ending. Noted in notations. Cited in citations. A spicy nirvana. A bratwurst
A gourmet mission
Versatile but raided
Damaged by break-ins
Mudslides of madness
Reduced to bones
Capped giants
Fraudulent night colors of contraception