I confess: Once a Wiccan, never a historian, ever gay—I too stand guilty under examination of Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez's [A/An: Observations Upon Witches].

Does the very human pursuit of goodness—one's collective estimation that feels so deeply personal—always conjure evil spirits? If you dare turn its pages, A/An answers. This "Devil's book," composed of a poetic series of "examinations" and one visual series, repurposes 17th century court records of the Salem Witch Trials to resurrect seven condemned people and their uncontestable powers. Each examination functions as a trial of an accused witch, Q&A style, whose testimony doesn't deny the charge of behaving contrary to the flock's morals, but guiltlessly attests to their subjective desires and so condemns them [maladjusted], Other. Fearlessly, Gutmann-Gonzalez raises the dead trailing the consequences of contemporary practices of deeming who among "us" belongs and the seductive fiction of purity.

The witches' voices, gifted by the magic of (non)fictionalization, refuse to cower. They burn with shameless self-possession—the value of being themselves more than saving themselves. As Gutmann-Gonzalez notes, "In the magistrates' eyes, the accused were always guilty, and could only save their lives by admitting to the guilt and accusing others [...]. In other words, witchcraft was contagious" (41). The state could only punish, not acquit the publicly be-witched—perhaps its only sound judgment. With no conception of peace for souls wedded to immorality, no conversion therapy could exist powerful enough to "correct" their awesome Realness.

Where A/An serves as a meditation of the good & normal versus the bad & weird, the early American English-esque grammar echoes Puritanical rhetoric that persists as persecution into the present. "Law will circle any form," (6) George Jacobs, Sr., reminds us—how when codified, moral, racial, sexual, etc. purity manifests as state-sanctioned violence, against which Guttman-Gonzalez works, potent as a hex. I fear that to laugh at the Trials from a comfortable distance as if a tragedy of a bygone worldview evokes tragedy. If purity remains a personal commitment with political consequences, at the root of anti-2SLGBTQIA+ discrimination, it seems that we must face the past in (re)imagining socio-political futures or be doomed.

While [anti-2SLGBTQIA+ legislation continues to plague these United States of Hysteria], I want to rise to A/An's call to disarm witch hunters by humanizing devilry and by accusing you.

To my eyes, the witches, manuscript, and world(s) teem with deviance. When the examiner of Bridget Bishop asks, "Are we sure this is a woman? Say: ah. The evidence doth endanger a handred times," (4) I am loathed to agree. Without Q or A, the poem evidences how the existence of a single gender-ambiguous person destabilizes the foundation of essentially gendered body-souls. Further, Sarah Good's observation of the Devil, that "[…] still he is unshe athed through our punishments," affirms for me the transformative power of transreality. I read here that the Devil un-shes her as relentlessly as persecution fails to vanquish his man-ifestation. Gender queerness functions to re-attune the body and/or its hungers, experienced in & off the text as [trans magic], judged by the uninitiated as corruption of the body-soul. When we "witches" accept any perversity as transformation, natural as pollination or a molting, fundamentalist fearmongering rages against our spread "like a smallpoxxe," as witnessed recently as "transgenderism" labeled a "social contagion."

I need to believe the binaries of "in or out," "with or against" are a matter of (mis)perception. For example, in the "Examination of Martha Carrier," the "Queen of Hell," rises, her feet don't touch the ground, closer to god and saint by my estimation—all of which the examiner deems weightier proof of wickedness. Admittedly, an old queer, I observe deviations of sex and gender in most people. While Normal appears an illusion conjured to necessitate sacrifices—the competition requisite of survival under capitalism and the cull of inequity—arguably, my gay-dar utilizes similar psycho-social skillsets: projection unto, judgment of, gossip about, consequences for.

As a trans femme, I am grossly aware of my performance of in-group and out-group condemnations. Others' choices, from boyfriends to shoes to top surgeons, have fallen under my interior jurisdiction of permissive or transgressive. While seemingly minor violence, I'm approaching an uncomfortable reality that judgments upheld in defense of whatever ground we hold as "ours" walls love like a resource—and what I can't love is too easy to burn, verbally or otherwise. Relationship boundaries, transition goals, disordered eating habits—too often, my first impulse to establish safety is to exert control. If no difference in human behavior, I pray my grander assumption that we're all maladjusted both familiarizes and disarms deviance, allows for a spectrum of subjectivities and desires, necessary conditions for Others to be so that I-you can be, too. In other words, may we be humane-ed in admission of wickedness.

Maybe allegiance to purity or contamination both require surrender—but to whom? If purity demands winnowing, deprivation of sensory experience and delimiting of action with/upon others, value-determined as right or wrong, in either case assumed knowable, by an arbiter (person, entity, organization) outside the self to whom we grant stewardship of our body-soul as proof of goodness, devotion, faith—then contamination surrenders to [the more and more of experience], intermingling with/upon Others (a kind of devotion), led by the bodys' hungers (a kind of faith), a force like possession that provokes us to bear our burning souls like lanterns deeper into the woods of the unknown (a kind of goodness)?

A/An confronts the tragedy of the Salem Witch Trials in how the pursuit for purity (moral, biological, political, etc.) proves futile, a desperate retreat to "God's pastur" (7), an uncorrupted state inhumane and ahistorical, as in never existed more than the myth of a more perfect time and deadly fantasy to mark unworthy bodies for slaughter. Arguably, contamination (moral, biological, political, etc.) and its wake of transformation present catalysts for growth, even if single-yield, the fruit of bodily autonomy, or as Gutmann-Gonzalez shamelessly articulates: "you wold I ride upon" "history" "(y'r phaentasy)" "to doe yr dirty work" "on a stick or poale" "but in truth we Ride" "takeing hold of one another" "& my image is" "usable to me too" (13). As a sex worker, I find in this articulation of "witch"—excommunicated yet communicable—a kind of whore praxis. "To whore" within and against the laws & mores of the whole, in survival and subversion of a (cultural, biological, mythological) body, challenges purity obsessions that have [shaped queer life since the 80s], offering a power and practice in harmony with mother nature to move and let move.

An ye harm none, do what ye will.

Call me "afflictad," "rampent hag," "hell's door Ajar," before you to pass "[…] my hunger onto my neighbors, who call me unsavory though I taste of their groceries" (5). Because I love my neighbors, hold abundant faith that what we seek in all the dark mysteries of ourselves and each other is more love, life, roots of the tree that carries us all. Being so called out, permits others to be out more safely or at least less alone—so I plead you to read A/An and, enflamed, co-conspire.