Self-Portrait in 2012

Enter a witch.

Not exactly cat-clever.
Not exactly a witch.

Old at nineteen, rib without cage,
fingertips on glass shards, black
bread in her mouth—

a motherless thing.

Enter a witch with a licking obsession:

all night and day, she drags
her lame legs in an empty ward
and licks and licks—

Infected wounds only.
She licks them all clean.

She is mother of the Infected,
full of dumb questions:
Do ants dream when they sleep?
Why did Virginia Woolf write
on blue paper when she chose
her Ophelia death?

Her eyesight is all
lighting and hail:

She looks at rats and sees
stars.

Enter a witch who sits in a Victorian bath-tub,
talks to herself:

Drink your Dom Pérignon, Ms. Illusion.

Eat your spoonful of black coal.
Let it burn and churn
in your throat, let it
take shape.

You will be a nun
on hunger strike when you die, Ms. Martyr.
You will taste of attic, forest-fire
and black bile, even though
you are an Aegean girl.

Consider: a witch asleep
in the ruptured womb
of a giant crow.

A creature within a creature.

She sits in your bathtub, eats your
black bread, opens the windows
to let your departed soul out.

Like this, she gives you back to the world.

Artemis Maragkoudaki is an undergraduate student in the School of English at Aristotle University. She writes about all things she finds to be crooked and beautiful. She currently lives in Thessaloniki with her four cats, and is content not to know what the future holds.