My artwork evolved out of a convergence of global, personal, and national events. By March 2020 the coronavirus had become a worldwide pandemic. Confined and seeking a time-intensive activity, I bought a sewing machine and began learning to use it.
My mother is dying. We’re not quite sure when, but one needs be prepared. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. She’s ninety-two, after all, and has been ailing for quite a while. Ninety-two, and has outlived anyone in the family by decades. Her parents, her sister, her husband, a child. All her in-laws, several nieces and nephews, countless friends.
For me, wrestling history is a guidepost for some of my more nebulous memories, as well as a link to some simpler life moments. I always remember wrestling playing some role in those memories, mainly the issues of WWF magazine I was reading. They’re like anchors that make the memories more authentic, and they help validate the trauma that was to come later on in my life.
Grief invades
the thin columns of days. A phone
rings. Tree bark flakes
away. I become
salt on tongue, raw
Martha Witt is the author of the novel Broken as Things Are (Henry Holt, 2004; Picador, 2005). She has received a Fulbright grant and fellowships from Yaddo, Ragdale, and VCCA colonies. Her short fiction, some of which has been translated into Italian, appears in national and international literary journals. Italica Press has published four novels and two plays she co-translated with Mary Ann Frese Witt.
I just added the word “disabled” to my author’s bio. Before that, I was using “neurodivergent” or “AuDHD” (the amalgamation of Autism and ADHD) as the first descriptors after my name, but thanks to receiving an autism diagnosis around my 35th birthday, I began toying with the idea of typing out “disabled” in describing myself to literary magazines.
haute couture, touch parade, codex of refusal, faux doughnut, authentic glaze, fat white, flat cat
hair, stick & poke baby, poetry is willing the infection out the page, a strain of silk like a virus up
the esophagus & into another’s mouth—
rust hanky, not the cowboy but his horse, femme gays, t-girls & t-boys, stone butch lesbians,
genderfuckers, anarcho-queers, those who have yet to be, those who wear poetry like a tear in the
Oh god, I never quite know how to introduce myself.
As is chronic to infrastructure, my identity sits at a crossroads. Or, at least, crossroads are the default for our self-definition, the traditionalist’s approach: “I’m the red pin on the map;” “I’m the intersection of 114 and Broadway;” “I’m the first house off the exit.”
You spill,
end of delight,
a translucent initial in my pelvis,
When we woke up, everywhere we looked, parachutes. Pierced on church steeples, crumpled in meadows. Cast over roof gutters and laid bristling against treetops. They sagged from branches like the carcasses of ghosts.
Empty chairs in Plac Bohaterów Getta: memorial to victims and resistance fighters in Jewish Ghetto of Krakow Poland.
That August I chewed a pill
and slept. A green dragonfly lit
my daughter’s hand on fire. Her new
school planted tens of thousands
It seems to be dragging its freight
like an enormous beast.
On Monday at dawn,
two children saw a body
floating in the current,
BA, Theatre, Small Liberal Arts College, 2017
I graduated in the spring of 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in theatre (spelled with an RE to show this was a deeply academic and artistic liberal arts theater program). I moved to Chicago from the small village in Ohio where I studied with dreams of “making it” as an improviser and comedy writer.
My collages are about a lot of things, but mostly they are about having fun. I collect magazines, posters, and used books from my community and travels. I use these pre-existing sources to create playful, approachable, and thought-provoking images that address issues of identity, value, and experience on an individual, national, and global level.
The origins of my villainy begin in early February 2020 when I drove to the other side of the state to stay with my parents for my mother’s birthday. This was a trip I did regularly, often alone. It felt like something of an escape, a place I could go and not feel the weight of everyday responsibilities.
Grief, at its heart, is a question.
What could I have done differently?
Why why why why why why why why why why why?
At Christmas, am I still supposed to cook the carrots with horseradish that no one else eats?
Or, rather, grief is many questions tumbling on top of one another.
there is life here…
if you look hard / drink hard
an intrinsic brightness of being
to the gas-station dreamers
Go back, go home, go away with your language
In my land, only order takeaway with your language
ਤੂੰ ਇਤਨਾ ਛੱਪਰ ਛੱਪਰ ਦੱਸੇ ਤੋ ਸਮਝ ਕਿੱਥੋ ਆਵੇ
“I made dal last night” might be the most unremarkable thing anyone can say because probably so did half a billion people in India alone. I made dal last night in Los Angeles because it rained as much in a day as the whole of last year, and I wanted more than comfort food.
Because all the birds do not fall
frozen from the trees,
and the squirrels do wake in time, most of them,
from their torpor, to the memory of nuts
under the snow lying inert for the whole bitter season;
You wash your hair with the soap Perla. You get dressed in a long-skirted baro’t saya. You have a
red typewriter, one you borrowed from your Lola. You arrive at school, one of three women in a
class of ten. You raise your hand for your American teacher in recitation. You think your
seatmate is muy guapo.
As a woman artist, I feel most qualified to offer perspectives on what it means to be a woman in the world. Such work enables us to consider women in ways that focus on our lives, passions, and past histories, and consider how the male gaze has historically objectified women, fragmenting their outward appearance from their personhood and psychological experiences.
We’re traveling to the little farm our grandparents built in the middle of the vineyards. With feet used to the dried up rhythm of our tired city, Minu and Rumbi will step, for the first time, into the simple world of vegetables, fruits, and farm animals.
The leak started when they were sitting on the couch: Frank reading the paper, Martha knitting, the radio playing a song they had danced to once, though neither could quite remember where. The ceiling opened and spilled right onto the cushion between them, and they turned to watch it pour.
I’ve always gravitated to poetry. I remember writing in high school for the literary journal. Then, in college, I started taking creative writing courses, specifically poetry ones and even changed my major to English from Anthropology—primarily because I had taken an Intro to Poetry writing course and loved it.
I realized I had to do this for better or worse.
I love your crusty right earlobe, pressed into a suitcase of sleep,
rinsed clean like a dumpling under steaming shower to stave
away arthritis nerves & wanting; Remi, I love your micro-penis, curled
& dangling like a secret in thrush & thicket, engorged from years
of hormone creationism; Remi, I love your flat chest sprinkled with hairs
If the world ends in fire, my family will survive. Here’s the truth: after the house burned down, I was restless for twenty moons and filled with more shame than the prosecuted. The guilt was too massive for my eleven-year-old body to carry, but I stored it in the pit of my stomach for five years.
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