A magic spell is like a web — a catching tool that’s full of holes. As a witch, I get to play the role of THE ELEGANT SPIDER in this scene. If the spell I weave is sticky enough, I can catch whatever I want with it. If I know what I want, it's very simple. Unless, of course, it’s not. If we’re being strict materialists for a moment, all any magic spell amounts to is a collection of words, a candle or a handful of herbs that reminds me of my intention. It’s just an arts and crafts project meant to represent something that has not yet come to pass. But if we’re being witches, a spell is a knot that I tie in reality. And it’s only logical that knots have their loopholes. Magic words are slippery things that tend to wiggle free from your intention if you leave the slightest room. If you want to be a good witch you better be an elegant little spider, too.

I’ll give you an example. When I cast a spell to find my first apartment, I drew a diagram of what I was looking for as a physical representation of my goal, as one does. And it worked! The first and only place I saw matched my diagram exactly, but my mistake was that the drawing didn’t include any doors or halls, so the bedrooms were separated by a sliding sort of wall — you had to walk through the one room to get to the other. I still considered the spell a success, but I noted the subtle lesson in it: Be careful what you ask for because you might get exactly that.

On another dumb occasion, I gave my crush to the moon. That is to say, I did a spell to rid myself of those burdensome feelings, foolishly giving them over to the full moon to hold for me. The intention was that their intensity would diminish a bit each night, as the moon did. And it worked! For approximately 14 days. And then it didn’t work anymore — for reasons that seem obvious now. The moon also waxes — duh. As a poet and a witch I am subordinate to metaphor — as soon as I saw the moon begin to wax again, so did my lunatic feelings. Now, when I’m trying to be rid of something for good, I give it to an entity that’s less likely to reflect it right back to me a couple weeks later.

And then there’s that time I made up a cool meditation technique to practice on the subway. I would visualize colors at different points on my body, aligning them with my very basic and critically ill-informed ideas of how the chakras work. I didn’t really know what to visualize at my crown so I’d just sort of forget it sometimes. As it turns out, that’s bad! If I’m going to raise energy, apparently I have to give it someplace to escape. Things got all backed up and I kept having intense pain in my skull whenever something good or exciting would happen, which was particularly awful because I’d just published a book and it was a pretty good, exciting time for me. I went to a cranial sacral therapist who said, without my prompting, “Hey, are you having trouble releasing energy through the top of your head?” and casually referred to the energetic channels at the back of my neck as “a rat king.” A rat king is a real thing that you can’t unsee once it’s described, so I’ll describe it. A nest of rats gets its tails tangled inextricably together leaving them to writhe en masse into your nightmares forever! You don’t want one. I had to have mine removed. I still meditate in a similar way, but now I don’t intentionally visualize anything. I just observe the colors as they come and go without risking any rat king.

At this point, I’m abundantly cautious of the potential unintended consequences of my magic. Maybe too cautious. The last time I even considered a love spell I was so thoughtful and circumspect, so wise and fair and well-measured that I can’t tell if the fucking spell worked or not. I sat there by the river with my pumpkins and my champagne and I asked the goddess for what was best rather than what I thought I wanted. I might have made a mistake, but I can only assume I got what I asked for.

Mya Spalter is author of Enchantments: A Modern Witch’s Guide to Self Possession (Random House/Lenny Books) and the chapbook Crush Reactor. She’s a poet and an editor, but she's writing a novel anyway.