Today at a seminar, a woman asks me about 'witchy weather' and 'necromancy'. I blank on 'witchy weather' until I remember that, while the Palisades fire was still burning, my uncle sent me a YouTube video in which two men in a typical American podcast setting blamed the 'three lesbians' in the LA Fire Department, together with mayor Karen Bass ("rumoured to be a lesbian", they say) for the destruction of the fires. On the train ride home, I dig out an unfinished poem that I wrote some months ago using lines from that podcast. Reading it again, the link to the figure of the witch seems all too clear...

“The mayor was in Ghana
at a cocktail party
when she was warned
of the Santa Ana wind.”

“She was warned about the winds
that the chaparral had not been cleared
that there was not sufficient water”

“That she’d cut the fire department budget
by 17 million dollars
and wanted to cut it by 50”

“That she appointed an LGBTQ activist
as the fire chief
who bragged
she was to hire
70% DEI.”

~ ~ ~

“I just have to ask, as I don’t live in California:
Is most of the leadership of the LA fire department
overweight lesbians?”

“The fire chief is,”
“The assistant fire chief is,”
“There’s rumours the mayor is.”