11/22/2024

“A drum, a drum! Macbeth doth come” :
Week 3 of November Writing Challenge

Come, you spirits
 That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex  me here,
 And fill me from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty. 

Wednesday was Trans Day of Remembrance. For those not steeped in the unbearable tragedy of transness in these United States, it's the day where we gather and grieve our dead, our lost, our murdered family across the country. My people and I met in a park under the moon to hold candles and space for each other while we spoke their names. As we spread blankets on the wet ground and struggled against the wind with our candles, my friend leaned over and whispered to me:

“There's something kind of witchy about this, right?”

She was probably joking, trying to ease the unbearable weight of the night’s grief, but long after we wound up our charm and went out for pizza and drove our separate ways home, I felt her words.

There was something witchy in our ritual, in our solidarity, in our quiet defiant chanting in the dark. My friend June and I read poems, our faces in flame. That night, alone, I read the names of the lost again and said a Hail Mary for each one. We are blessed among women, now and at the hour of our death.

Together in the wet dark we were witches. We were the strange sisters of tragedy, upon the battle-bloodied heath of our own Scotland. In early translations, the witches were referred to as the Weyward Sisters. They had chosen their own way, cavorting in front of cauldrons and communing with devils according to their own ways. It felt like that, even beneath the grief-ful silence, we were casting our spells on the world. We were carving our siblings' names on the sky in flame. They would burn there forever where their light would outlast the stars.

Wednesday was a day of silence. It was a day of gentle respect. It was meant as a breath. Now, in the shadow of that silence, is a time for screams, for songs, for sound. I want to laugh loudly with my sisters at parties and concerts and in living rooms where there's so much joy that we weep from it. I want to write and howl poems at the sky. I want to kiss the wind until I swell with purpose like a bellows. There is a fire. It must be fed.

Macbeth and Banquo discover the witches on their way home from battle. These secretive, strange women who gathered together with a single purpose and an urgent question:

When shall we three meet again?

I think of my sisters. I think of the howling heath of my lands, the unrest of our new king, and I feel myself Weyward. I, too, wind my magic around fate and try with words to change it. I have wrought such terrible change upon my body, become such a hunched and beckoned daughter of Hecate, that extending that change to the world seems less impossible. The rhymes and gossips of witches, of refugees, of tragedy's strange daughters became the very threads of kings' robes, of destiny itself.

I want to find the spell underneath my words. I want to spin the dark prayer of my sorrow into the ruin of kings. They are already so terribly vexed by us, by my sisters, that it can't be impossible. My nation's new king saw me, saw my people, and saw their own dreadful fate.

Where hast thou been sister? Killing swine.

And so the terrible work of the month's remaining days takes on this grave pallor. I am to be a weaver of curses. I am to be a siren of graves. I am to be a Weyward Sister of hideous magics. A new king in January, an old tyrant again. The hurly-burly continues its raucous way. And my sisters and I meet on our heath. We pillory the world order by having pizza in public, by laughing loudly, by feeling joy in a world that would grind us into colorless chalk.

Sweet sisters, sweet brothers, sweet gravechildren whose names find me with wings of prayer, fill my tongue with curses, with rhymes, with ugliness to match your grace. Let us curse these times with terrible fate.

New king, old king,
legislators of our bloodied heath,

May you never know true sleep again, may your nights be full of distorted guitars and gossip.

May ever running water sound like a woman laughing. May your every troubled step echo with dance. May your food be flavorless as we women feast together. May you find no joy, no respite, no pride or purpose under your crowns. May they break your necks with ill-fitting weight.

Choke, leaders, on the smoke of my sisters as they scratch the ceiling of heaven. May you hear wings where your heartbeat would be, may your every second be a banquet of we contorted carrion birds.

We are made wrong, you tell us. Our origins are ichorous and foul. Let us drown you in wrongness, ill-fitting as power in your feeble hands. You cannot regulate us. You cannot paper a bonfire into embers. You cannot starve us. We do not need hormones to unsettle you with terrible beauty. We are dancing on the heath. We are timeless as battle. We love each other enough to ask, with limitless power, when shall we meet again?

There to meet with Macbeth.

Fuck whatever laws you carve with feeble swords. Fair is foul. Foul is fair.

I will honor the dead with ruin. I will honor the dead with kindness for none but my kin. I will honor the dead with poems and pizza and candles and flame and fucking and friendship and softness for my sisters. Softness for my brothers. Softness for my family.

Knives, teeth, and terror for everyone else.

Trans Day of Remembrance has passed. We are back to feeling nothing but rage. Rage that will haunt your bodies like sickness, you spoiled kings of rotten countries. For you there will be no rest, no respite from us.

We will never stop being hideously beautiful in front of you. We will never stop looking like the yellowed, open mouths of tigers. We will be bloody, we will be loud, we will be beautiful.

We will outlive you. We will know joy.

Peace, sisters.

The charm's wound up.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B