We don’t burn witches anymore because that went out of style in the 1700s, and is so not fetch. I’d rather be burned, letting the beast inside of my heart finally rip free as my fingers bubble blister burst into sap, or drown, cold and dark and silt-steeped at the bottom of a frozen lake, instead of all the other options.
No we don’t burn witches anymore. It was burning, then hanging, then life in prison surrounded by groping hands and grasping guards and smallpox and rumors and bloody hanger after bloody hanger then asylums and re-educating until we wished you would just get off your green-screen high horses and burn us!
We don’t burn anymore. We smoke them out, we ruin them until their brain is smog and ashes and then gasp when they burn themselves. Don’t waste the water on witches, it was her choice to chant the incantation, light the match, stay in the building, don’t waste sympathy on seductresses or thoughts on thots or prayers on prostitutes or wishes on plain old women.
We don’t burn witches anymore, we sort them. Start with 2 distinct piles, witches and not-witches. Actually three, most not witches are probably-someday-witches, so ignore those, and then you’ve got three options. The crone, old and quiet and crazy who lives in libraries and speaks to birds and doesn’t wear jewelry her hair uncut for forty years dried herbs and Dorothy Parker needlepoint above her doorway and more then her century of wisdom stitched up inside her. She’s probably a mother, and before she was a mother she was a maybe-witch so once she took a step in the right direction no one looked at her anymore. She went from homey to mother, to hag and now you can’t even remember her names.
Next, we have the tinder, the gasoline soaked frame practically begging for matches, asking for it. She talks and talks and talks and never stops talking, not when they shush her in grade school and punish her in middle and ignore her in highschool, not as she’s turned down and stalked and threatened and ignore and she doesn’t have names either, first chatterbox, then bossy, then ball-buster, then loose-lipped then they find some way to shut her up with needles and fire.
Lastly there’s the maiden. She always starts out as the maiden, white gowns that ride up above the knee and garlands of roses and bud lips and she will go right from maiden to promiscuous, because you can’t walk all the way to town, you need a ride from the baker’s boy and his fare is kisses, to slutty when she’s caught trading nudes for silence online because she just needs someone to talk to, then she’s a seductress when josh leaves his girlfriend for the curve of her thighs, and finally, she’s a liar. She always ends up a liar. The Tinder and the Crone end up liars too, they’re all just liars.
And you know what we do to liars
We burn them.
No we don’t burn witches anymore. It was burning, then hanging, then life in prison surrounded by groping hands and grasping guards and smallpox and rumors and bloody hanger after bloody hanger then asylums and re-educating until we wished you would just get off your green-screen high horses and burn us!
We don’t burn anymore. We smoke them out, we ruin them until their brain is smog and ashes and then gasp when they burn themselves. Don’t waste the water on witches, it was her choice to chant the incantation, light the match, stay in the building, don’t waste sympathy on seductresses or thoughts on thots or prayers on prostitutes or wishes on plain old women.
We don’t burn witches anymore, we sort them. Start with 2 distinct piles, witches and not-witches. Actually three, most not witches are probably-someday-witches, so ignore those, and then you’ve got three options. The crone, old and quiet and crazy who lives in libraries and speaks to birds and doesn’t wear jewelry her hair uncut for forty years dried herbs and Dorothy Parker needlepoint above her doorway and more then her century of wisdom stitched up inside her. She’s probably a mother, and before she was a mother she was a maybe-witch so once she took a step in the right direction no one looked at her anymore. She went from homey to mother, to hag and now you can’t even remember her names.
Next, we have the tinder, the gasoline soaked frame practically begging for matches, asking for it. She talks and talks and talks and never stops talking, not when they shush her in grade school and punish her in middle and ignore her in highschool, not as she’s turned down and stalked and threatened and ignore and she doesn’t have names either, first chatterbox, then bossy, then ball-buster, then loose-lipped then they find some way to shut her up with needles and fire.
Lastly there’s the maiden. She always starts out as the maiden, white gowns that ride up above the knee and garlands of roses and bud lips and she will go right from maiden to promiscuous, because you can’t walk all the way to town, you need a ride from the baker’s boy and his fare is kisses, to slutty when she’s caught trading nudes for silence online because she just needs someone to talk to, then she’s a seductress when josh leaves his girlfriend for the curve of her thighs, and finally, she’s a liar. She always ends up a liar. The Tinder and the Crone end up liars too, they’re all just liars.
And you know what we do to liars
We burn them.
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Yellow Sweater
Sep 21, 2021
This is so disconcertingly blunt. I love it.