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Galactic Rabbit November 2016

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Because we live in in the new world order, which is also the old world order taking off its veil, I am writing toward the moon, my love, this evening and well into the night. Under that wide-open eye we are all illuminated. The ocean of brutality is unknowable, intimate and dangerous, but we are powerful together—a glimmering school of healers and survivors.

In the streets, there are those of us who were born lucky enough to move through the world with hope’s fire in our hearts. I see the fire doused in you now. I know you will find a way to stay warm and warm others. I know that you are here because you want to be of use to the world, to serve the greater good. And there is so much good, I promise.

In the streets, there are those of us who have always felt so invisible, so valueless to those who are in power, that fascism comes as no surprise. I see the well of your knowledge overflowing, and it is unbearable. You have no illusions to shed. You admit you are tired, you admit that this country broke your heart from the very start. You have never had time to lie down and rest.

If the winds of fate have brought us here, a wheel turned and we are at the bottom. And the earth was dry on our journey, and there was blood soaking the soil we walked on, however reverently. Beloved, you drank from the sorrow in the well, forged weapons in the fire. What do we know of our limits now? For years we have counted the bodies they said were not worth counting. Now, who will drag the dead to the feet of our autocrat and make demands?

If we have failed, we must fail harder. What we risk for those who are most vulnerable in our communities must equal what we risk to love one another and to love ourselves. For many of us, these factors are not distinguishable and for this reason we must protect each other when we walk together and we must be vigilant in our witnessing, since seeing is wrapped in knowing and knowing is historical.

To respect your history, I will love you and not expect love in return. I will fight for your right to rest and I will find honor in the fight itself, never the recognition. And, since our country has never wanted us, it is to your joy that I pledge my allegiance. I can’t tell you who I am to you, only who I aim to be.

Your Lover & Accomplice,
Galactic Rabbit

 

P.S. This is entirely an unpaid labor of love by someone with no financial “net” so if you would like to donate to the making of these horoscopes, you can do so here!


Aquarius

Outside everything is grey and I’m in bed listening to Placebo because, apparently, the threat (see: certainty) of a white supremacist inside the White House makes me regress. The singer is repeating the words “Protect me from what I want” over and over and this is reminding me of Jenny Holzer’s projections which is making me wonder if the world ever changes at all or has it always been like this and always will be—kings in golden thrones drinking the blood of the poor, cointelpro pitting us against each other so that our energy boils at the bottom of this brutal capitalist well and stays there—evaporating our collective power.

How many Cassandras have we birthed and discounted? Who trusts a woman whose knowledge is integral to her very being, has come from no man’s mind. And how often have you, Aquarius, aimed to prove yourself through acquiry? The books you’ve read in an attempt to be an expert at your own life stack high in your mind and cast foreboding shadows.

In a world like this one, you are taught to doubt what is innate in you, your own readiness to be yourself. It is your job from now on to unlearn whatever has diminished your sense of inner knowing, to traverse the universe of your mind with great anticipation.


PISCES

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

-Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99.

We were talking about darkness but not our own, because it is easier to talk about the darkness of others. You proposed that there are some people out there who think they’re the underdogs, despite their own excess of power, the kind of people who bake pies and sing hymns while their neighbors are dragged from their homes, the kind of people who invest in liberty only as much as it allows them to barricade their lives from the suffering of others.

These kinds of people are a shadow side the way the moon is a shadow side, always present and especially visible in times of darkness. In talking of the shadow side I remembered a woman I had known. She was very tall, her body a thermometer with mercury levels indicating a nervous, melancholic disposition. This disposition lent itself to many subtle cruelties, as melancholy lends itself to self-indulgence, but she believed herself a healer and a self-less lover, a woman at the knife’s edge of surrender. In remembering her I know I remember all the ways I saw myself in her.

The Piscean journey, I know, is that of a healer who must face their wound always. Who must, against all forms of outer and (especially) inner resistance, recognize the shadow side of their nature and reckon with its intentions. There are no self-less healers among us and cannot be. When you act, what part of you acts from the wound? When you listen, what wounds within you obscure your ability to witness the wounds of others?


ARIES

Tanks of the blown-off world. He is my beautiful offshore a caw caw of major spills and elsewhere no, no. Cut the dialect the binary the dear word so precious and forbidden. They use the machines to take the streets of the world. Horizon my headwater cut cut the cable my beignets my else an appetite “poor politics, poor poor pols.” Waters of the world in media cut cut the lines manipulate desire and show the word show the Man show the tablets a Paleolithic grab all the twilight fields of discontent that shadow governments rise up people of the world of many wounded galaxies of discontent. And hear you, people of the word.

–History Will Decide / Anne Waldman

Because last night I was in a small room where Anne Waldman (the woman, the legend, the triple Aries) cast a circle. She cast that circle not in salt but in poetic bellows charged with grief for the optimistic delusions we have allowed ourselves to live inside and the consequences of our enduring commitment to an economy of brutality. The last straw of honor broken across this country’s back, she proclaimed and I felt the straw break in my mind, recognizing at once that the straw had been broken long ago over the bodies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Natasha McKenna, and Renisha McBride (among too many others).

This morning, while listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ Bout A Revolution,” I heard the call to action again—a call that refused to claim weakness or abdicate its own claim to power—and I wondered what an Aries could teach us about fighting for the world we want. And, I wondered what an Aries would need to learn in order to be a good teacher.

Because we know that we cannot hope to be given power, and must instead learn how to claim it, the onus is on us to understand the many ways that grasping for power corrupts our perception and empathic capabilities. And, if you are to understand power, you must understand your relationship to control—how much you want to have and how much you fear to lose. Be especially mindful of your intimate circle, Aries, since it is the first circle you cast and the one that fortifies you against the cruelties of the outer world. Tucked into every fearless fighter’s armor is the handkerchief of a fearless lover.

TAURUS

Dear friend, I mean to you write you tonight but instead I write here and feel you very close. I know you have been out in the streets for days, chanting among the dissidents in all kinds of weather. In my heart, I walk beside you and witness your keen sense of injustice. It is something I have always known and admired in you: the power of your convictions. Strong but not inflexible, you are both open to learning and yet entirely devoted to what your heart knows to be true.

It is your will to change that I appeal to now and although typing those words has reminded me of Adrienne Rich’s Will To Change and I have found the title poem to share with you—how it indicts us as Americans (we immigrant who have never felt truly American)—I am moved to share some lines from Planetarium with you instead.

The radio impulse   

pouring in from Taurus

         I am bombarded yet         I stand

I have been standing all my life in the   

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most   

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15   

years to travel through me       And has   

taken      I am an instrument in the shape   

of a woman trying to translate pulsations   

into images    for the relief of the body   

and the reconstruction of the mind.

I choose these words because I can feel a space opening within you. Or, perhaps, what I feel is the Rubik’s cube inside you shifting, twisting, an alignment you could not have foreseen. It is as painful as it is clear, this reconstruction, but I know you are strong enough to bear it. Not only bear it but also embrace it. Taurus, on the other side of chaos is birth, a woman whose strength is this country’s backbone. A woman who is not afraid to surrender to love’s power over her.

GEMINI

And as I stand before you now, I am hopeful in my rage
You know love has finally called for me, I will not wilt upon its stage
But still smaller than my nightmare now do I print upon the page
Do we have to live inside its walls to identify the cage?
–It Won’t Take Long / Ferron

At the KGB lit bar, three women are writing their way out the mind’s prison, or painting the bar of the prison of their mind so that they can see it, and I am walking to them. On the way, I pass a kickboxing gym that’s filled with only women. Sweat and spit fling from the womens’ orifices as they exert their force against punching bags that hang heavy and indestructible. They are like Amazons readying for war, I think. They are Amazons readying for war.

And, the poetry of the night is a kind of mental kickboxing by which I am made limber and supple with tears in the opening act before my Gemini friend invites the audience into the ring to roundhouse with language. Garish erasures of Playboy, the magazine all women are slipped in the prison of their minds, vector from her sharp frame of lace and opaque gemstone. Intimacy and hardness, interior and exterior war, when she is done we go outside and repeat her words back to her like they are roses in our hands. I want to say the line “practicing a knowing toward love,” but I can’t be sure of what I heard or what I might reveal about myself in the repeating. So instead I touch her hand and look into her face, lit in burgundy light like a pomegranate seed.

O Gemini, what will you do with everything you know? Do our minds protect us from our hands, even as we crawl on hands and knees toward our destruction, toward the demons that live in us and through us who know pain’s astonishing intimacy? Remember the boxing gym aptly named Overthrow where the Amazons box. How, in boxing, one protects their hands—the very thing ones uses to inflict hurt and compel submission. Practicing a knowing toward love… I think I understand. It’s admitting a weakness that is also a tool. That is also a weapon.

CANCER

I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

                                                                                                           Camera Lucida / Roland Barthes

It is true that in mourning our hearts open wider, a wound like an aperture that absorbs all light, all suffering, the foreground and background distinguishable only by lines where a figure might cut through. Why do we open the aperture? To bear witness, to catalogue what will be destroyed so that in looking back we know what needs rebuilding and must be overhauled. We open the aperture anticipating the larger possibilities of the future (believing that there will be one despite all evidence to the contrary).

In your home filled with the birth and death of flowers, we sing along to “Chelsea Hotel” and wonder aloud the thin line between sex tender and tendered. Who does the song belong to, the man who wrote it or the woman who never said I need you, I don’t need you? I compare it to Bishop’s “One Art” and, so, while you mince the dill so fine and green, I read the words aloud Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love). What I’m trying to say is that in the morning, over music and language and simmering vegetables, we determine that the grief we endure, for this country, for the ones we have lost, for the parts of ourselves we have had to lay to rest, will not strip us but instead empower us. We are the government now, you say.

In writing this, I take a picture of our power and protect it. The vows we make to each other will outlast this world we live in now and see us through to the next. Cancer, if there are moments when you fear you’re alone in this fight, you are not alone. What is an opening is also a light. Your wide-open heart: a signal. We see it, we move toward you, stand behind you, ready to claim and rebuild our broken world.


LEO

In a basement over boxes I packed so long ago I can barely remember what each one holds, I am parsing through my past and S is reading aloud the different kinds of love language we are capable of. Is gift giving one of your primary love languages? I exacto a flimsy strip of tape and pull out a blanket Maya bought me years ago simply because she adored how taken I was with it. Not really, I venture. But, remembering how much this blanket compelled me, I can’t be sure. It is true there is a Leo in my life whose offerings soften my heart. It is also true that I would love her just the same without those gifts, that I recognize the gifts as her love language and regard them as such.

According to someone who is very Christian named Gary Chapman, there’s five love languages: receiving gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service (devotion), and physical touch. When S reads these aloud to me and attempts to pinpoint what feels like love to her, I getting a sinking feeling that I must be one those greedy bitches that just needs it all. And, aren’t there larger, more unconscious, love languages? My Leo friend has this unrelenting will to illuminate the best qualities of everyone she loves while simultaneously forcing them to face their weaknesses and overcome them. It is the love language of witness and pride, the love language of her very being, and what draws me to her. When I take the test on the official website, I find that I score highest with “words of affirmation.” I think of my Leo, the way her praise feels so entirely genuine and perceptive, and a lump of recognition fills my throat. Feeling affirmed. Seen. Known.

Leo, the world is need of generous leaders and no matter what you do for money, your energy is precious now. So, you must spend it wisely with compassion for yourself as well as others. Can this approach to the language of love translate, for you, to a kind of creative force? A hope to “participate long term in a greater good.” If so, then it is in the interest of the greater good that you learn what compels you toward your life’s purpose. It is within your power to invoke the love you want.


VIRGO

And all this nation. Not nation. What was once expanse. You, I, they, us surrounded. Unable to ask forgiveness of itself, to inscribe particular in its own body that got left begins. As we separated to say.

Not of this nation and not of another.

–Face / Melissa Buzzeo

I’ve been sitting in a Starbucks in the town of Easthampton NY for over an hour, writing these love letters and waiting on my lover’s wife to return from her own writing group. I’ve also been watching one couple, a man and woman who appear in their early 60s, drunkenly claim and disavow each other. The woman climbs onto his lap and weeps. The woman strikes the man’s chest because her own heart aches. The man wraps his arms around the woman and then his arms fall limp. The man’s voice cracks with tears as he lists the wrongs he has endured and then it rises in anger. The woman leaves “until he can calm down.” The man grips the sides of the ugly puce fake tufted leather chair and I can hear the tears dribble down his face although he is silent. He leaves and in ten minutes they return to together. She crawls into his lap. They laugh and then they fall apart. A simple sentence! He yells and only she knows what that means. He calls her Girl and she says Please and strokes his face. If that girl sitting there finds my body dead, he gestures toward me, we’re through. I look down and don’t meet her gaze, thinking … well that’s indisputable.

Just this afternoon I was watching a video called “Why the Poorest County in West Virginia Has Faith in Trump.” In an opening interview with a former gas station worker who bides his time waiting for visitors at an inoperative station in McDowell County, West VA, an elderly man with eyes that resembled my father’s claimed “all the good activity is gone and we’re just sitting here now.” Now, I’m listening to this couple try to speak to one another and they just can’t and I know substances can make mud of meaning but the man sinks deep into his chair and declares, “I’m not a BUM! Just because I can’t afford to live here doesn’t mean I’m a bum! People know that I am good at my work. My work is good.” Suddenly, one of the poorest counties in America and the 5th richest county in one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world don’t seem so far apart.

Virgo, I’m writing you this now because I want to remind you that there is a wheel in this world that is always turning. Our surroundings determine our experience of the world and it is we who choose when to look and when to look away. And, although it might be true that “the poor stay poor and the rich stay rich,” we move through this world with an ever-shifting relationship to our past, our labor, our lovers, and ultimately our future. Just because you were handed a certain kind of package when you arrived into this life doesn’t mean you can’t alter it to look more like the package you want.


LIBRA

I want to begin by telling you that when I sat down to write this I was listening to Ella’s Song by Sweet Honey and the Rock, which was composed by the inimitable composer (and Libra) Bernice Johnson Reagon, and thinking about a Libra approach to liberation. In listening I remembered a few weeks ago when a friend of mine and I took turns counseling a Libra who had recently lost a loved one to a shocking homicide. I’m so depressed, he sighed, sprawling his upper body across the table, what can I do? The three of us sat in triangle formation for a while. Grief takes a long time, my friend suggested. Your depression is perfectly expected at this time. Her permission seemed to relieve him; she knew his loss in a way I did not. Still, it might be good for you to take up some kind of social contract, I proposed, an activity that provides you with the opportunity to generate connections and beauty.

Libras are social creatures, after all, and sweet interactions can be a kind of salve over the difficult wounds one must face when alone. I suggested soccer, a sport that seemed to offer rituals of value to him. Instead, he described writing workshops he led wherein he felt integral to opening the imaginations of other participants. Which of course brings me back to Ella’s Song, the part where the ensemble sings:

The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on 

Is when the reins are in the hand of the young who dare to run against the storm Not needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on me
I need to be just one in the number as we stand against tyranny

The Libra approach is an approach that thrives on community support and collaboration, a group of like-hearted souls working like hell to honor a loved one or, if a Libra feels capable of acting globally, tear down a regime. Unfortunately, that approach can at times be thwarted by Libra’s sensitivity, a trait that can trick them into feeling misunderstood and better off alone. But, Libra, although you can survive in solitude, you thrive in company. Just make sure the company you keep is the company you want, people who reflect the person you want to be in the world.


SCORPIO

There must be a reason that November stretched so long. Each morning the leaves get brighter and redder and it feels ok to wake up alone or, if not physically alone then, alone in the mind wandering into the morning as if it were an echo of every morning you have ever lived. The work is there, it keeps coming, but there is something about the quality of time that does not allow the work. So many beginnings without end, have you found yourself attracting strays? Have you found yourself looking too long in the mirror wondering what beauty is and what it can never be?

Someone taught you there is only so much of you someone can take. Someone taught you to measure your love out bit by bit. When you make coffee, you take a small spoonful of sugar and drop it in, then add more. You carry the mug with you from room to room and each room inside you feels absolutely necessary.

The love inside you fills the house of you like music. You can open the windows, you know. You can let the world right in with all it’s honking daybreak. You can put that song on, “Daybreaker,” because Beth Orton’s voice is a very good friend.

We burn our boats each new year

Silently watching the flames
And an old life disappear

We’re burning a new sunrise into
Yesterday’s skies
An ashen fingerprint
Melts into the sea

We’re doing fine now
Yeah we do
We don’t feel sad or bad or blue
And you know
We’re never defeated
Or broken inside

All that is fine
Yeah, all that is fine


SAGITTARIUS

There are certain kinds of nights that make me think of you and last night was one of them. For hours S and I played YouTube karaoke videos of Violet by Hole screaming take everything take everything take everything so that when we walked into the bar we’d be prepared. A blonde woman unknown to both us threw her arms around the two of us as we entered, proclaiming the party officially on because we had just arrived. S moved through the crowd greeting people she knew while I made a nest on the leather couch, the fireplace to my left and the singers to my right. Luxury. Two men, one of them recently out of a relationship, were singing I don’t want to lose your love toooooooniiiight. The blonde woman was up there with them too, sort of swaying, her long thin limbs extended toward every person in the room—especially but not exclusively the men.

Karaoke of the mind, it was the kind of night when every song a woman ever sang in the 90’s felt relevant. I leaned over to S and asked her if she thought the Blonde was practicing an unrestrained and playful kind of power or whether she was falling into a deep drunken well of weakness. In asking I remembered that Dar Williams song, “As Cool As I Am,” when she sings, “You play the artist, saying ‘is it how she moves or how she looks?’ I say ‘it’s loneliness suspended to our own like grappling hooks. And as long as she’s got noise she is fine.” And the woman was fine, happy to take up space the way men often do.

Watching her fed a whirring thing inside me, a thing I know you understand. It’s that thing that compels a woman to leave her whole life behind and begin again with nothing. It whispers bad ideas in your ear and makes them sound real good. Sagittarius, you and I both know that chaos is cathartic but it is not a cure. And I know the world is crumbling around us. I know how that crumbing can make you feel like life is too precious to waste and must be lived apologetically now now now. But, Sagittarius, living unapologetically means losing a lot more than you might be ready to lose so you better figure out what you need right now versus what you want. And remember, when you get what you want, well, you’ll never want it again.

CAPRICORN

Because whenever I hear the word angel I think of you, who has a name for every angel, and because I missed you, I went to listen to your poems in a dark and shadowy corner of Bryant Park. And, seeing you I felt the years since I’d seen you last and felt, too, the brightness of your laugh that is unlike anyone’s. And, I felt the crowd immersed in your all-seeing genius, your hard hoofed exploration of the world.

What parts of me shake loose dirt. What parts wait until you are bare. My jejune bluegrass, why do I eat your light. There are grasses growing up the shabby fence. All of them fluid blade. We sway. creep easily. What parts of me are wild. What parts storing up for the choke. How do I tell the difference. 

                                                            —Tatterdemalion / francine j. harris

And afterward, we hunted our own good time, the New York night deserting us and Ginger’s almost empty but for a handful of gay men whispering in corners. It was on us to create the space we wanted and so we did, my IPhone propped against the glass window of the deli we danced outside of. It was after 1:00 am and men walked in and out of that deli, young men and homeless men, most of them brown. And there were those who came to interpret us and there were those who yelled out just what our bodies could do for them out their passenger windows. And then, there were those who stood watching, whose eyes for the first time in a long time felt sentinel and without threat. There was a keen sense that the street did not belong to us but could, with Dej Loaf’s “Try Me” playing on and us singing along. It could have been that we were on every street corner in America and we were the only sirens that mattered.

What we manifested in that moment, with our wiggling girl bodies, was a moment of freedom in a country where freedom felt and feels like the deadliest illusion. But, illusions can be tools too if illusions are ambitions. It is time for you to be ambitious now. And, if you are dancing tonight, Capricorn, I hope your dancing is an ode to your own power. I hope you know that no matter how impossible the word safety is, no matter how often it falls short, you can bend it to your will and make of it what you must

 

 

 

 

Galactic Rabbit September. 2016

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Louise Bourgeois

Dear Autumnal Rabbits,

Today I bring you these letters, a small harvest I collected under the light of your stars. It’s almost 90 degrees outside in NYC, as if summer never ended, and I am grateful for the warmth of this day just as I am grateful for the cool crisp days ahead. I’ve spent the week feeling strangely envious of children, the incredible charge that came from the first day of school, a fantastical conviction that this year you would different. How your Lisa Frank folders and trapper keeper, particular mechanical pencils and three-colored pens, would raise your cool factor and make new friends a breeze.

My friend reminded me that in addition to the excitement, there was terror and isolation, fear of being found out for whoever we were then, and inevitably who we wound up being now.

In the spirit of excitement and fear, the kind that falls sparks us well past the age of childhood, I want to end this letter with a beautiful video of a “Soy Yo” by Bomba Estéreo.

Y no te preocupes si no te aprueban cuando te critiquen tu solo di / Soy yo
Soy yo soy soy soy/ Soy yo

 

With Love and Little Apples,

Galactic Rabbit

P.S. If you would like to contribute to the writing of these horoscopes, you can donate at my PayPal. 

 

AQUARIUS

I remember the state of your guitar particularly. The gloss and fullness of it, bodily, the strap sorta 70’s and almost wholesome. Like, Karen Carpenter wholesome. Like what’s happening under the surface of you where are you and what have we lost you to, sweet songbird? And I loved her bright clear voice like I loved your guitar, earnestly swinging behind you.

There’s grief, I guess, for the lives we imagined for ourselves and lost the blueprint to. And that grief is never-ending despite the fact that we didn’t begin this road together and we sure as hell had no idea where it would lead us and at what cost. When I saw you last, you were living in a house that might as well have had a white picket fence. You were in love, teaching music, you took me to a small town gay bar and I saw the best drag show of my life. Now I don’t know who you are and the possibilities pain me.

I stopped by your life and left so I guess this is a coward’s letter. The kind of letter you write to keep a memory intact then tuck into the corner of a musty cabinet. The internet with it’s river of voices is not so different from a black hole. But, if you are reading this, I want you to know that I remember you powerful. In my mind, you move through the world irreverent and unafraid of love’s possibilities. In my mind you are never lost, never unclear of the path you must choose toward feeling strong and free. I’ve got faith in you, songbird, your dark heart, and your guitar so sweet and clear.


PISCES

I didn’t know how to ride a bicycle until I was about 20. It was something that embarrassed me but I had excuses: my father was disabled and unable to teach me in that running-behind hands-on way, my brother never offered to, my friends would always stop being my friends etc etc. It took me a long time to commit to learning, to decide I deserved that particular kind of freedom. The first person who helped me help myself was a dear Pisces friend. For a couple of hours on a cool summer day she ran beside me as I tentatively pedaled her bike back and forth along Flatbush Ave. Later that year, I found a Kelly green Schwinn abandoned in an old shed behind a college house I was living in. I cleared it of cobwebs and claimed it.

This isn’t a letter about that bicycle. This is a letter about the moment when, riding around town with a girl I had been seeing on and off, I glanced behind me and in her face saw a happiness I dared to hold between my two open hands. It’s a letter about letting yourself hold happiness for as long as you can without being afraid of going too fast and falling too hard. About trusting yourself to brake when you need to, to take turns well and with grace. The freedom this new venture offers you, you deserve it and you know what to do with it. Wear a helmet, get on and ride.


ARIES

When a small animal is put in our hands, we are given delicate instructions. We accommodate its wriggling squirm and scramble, shifting our arms this way and that. Fragility is the obvious thing, the small bones and thin skin mewling. We know a woman can love a suckling pig and bring that pig to slaughter. That is a tenderness too, no matter its conclusion. Where does such tenderness come from? Asks Marina Tsvetsaeva of Mandelstam and his eyelashes although his love for her was hardly tender, often cruel and dismissive.

Sometimes, I have encountered women who moved me toward tenderness as if by compulsion—a dull ache in my hand to tuck her loose hair back behind her ear, to smooth the tension from her neck with a light stroke. More rare were the times I felt tender toward myself, stroked myself from collarbone to pelvis like a long worry stone. No one taught me tenderness toward myself, no one said, “be your own small animal, be gentle, be kind.” It was something I learned for myself and keep learning.

Each day you abandon yourself is a day you become less soft and less able to love others. So each day of your life you must say, “you are my charge, my tender thing, I will bring you what you need.” You are where tenderness comes from.


TAURUS 

We were there the moment Miriam opened for breakfast, a young woman propping the door with one hand and gesturing us in with the other. Grateful we’d arrived at the same time, our paths intersecting at the cross street, I felt a kind of hope flood me—a knowing. What is life and how do we think our way through it? You scanned the menu and I knew what both of us wanted. Summer cleaving into two parts, your time teaching in the woods and your time after—but this was a break in time, a day of endless meals and friends arriving—you knew soon that what “real life” was, you were returning.

Well, how does it feel to have returned? So many of your responsibilities, roles you anticipated and waited years for. And if it isn’t what you wanted—that is not a failure. It isn’t our lot to walk toward an oasis and settle peaceful amongst the grazing animals. We are not that kind. We were made to re-imagine to world, the clear a path through it as a hoofed land animal might—moving persistent through tall obscuring grass.

We were bathing in the dim light of morning and warmth of endless coffee re-fills. I said I feel too aware of the world—too aware of the intentions of others—what they mean versus what they say. You said I have always been this way, all my life. And, I knew that was where your strength came from, your ability to push through and onward toward a wide and more ample landscape.

GEMINI

I have a funny feeling about moons. Seems like I’m always looking for one when I’m in the mood to get a big eye-full and all I get is clouds, the obfuscation of cosmos. And, there I was, naked in a Hampton Bay waiting for bioluminescent transcendence, thwarted by the greedy light of the big full moon. In the dark water I swished my hands back and forth to activate barely visible small crystals of light, one doesn’t get what they want when they want it. I thought about how lucky I was to be swimming with my love, my friends and strangers, queers of various ages and races—free under the hooded eye of night.

Maybe life is all about chance, a double-sided coin that falls how it may—despite everything we learned about odds and probability. Or maybe there’s fate in it—a fist you can’t see grips the coin out the sky and slaps the back of your hand with the answer. Yes or no, go or stay, this way or that. Whichever power governs our lives, we stand square in the midst of these forces and we are culpable in their outcomes. We are the ones tossing the coin, looking toward the sky for answers and choosing whether or not to listen.

If you can’t see the moon imagine the moon. If you are walking through a dark path, let your eyes adjust to the dark. You are more than capable of getting where you need to be, you are not lost and you’re not without help. Be patient with yourself and the moon, it will light your way softly for a long time.

CANCER

A while ago I read an article that encouraged those of us going through heartbreak to lie down on the ground and feel it all, submit to Kali, Hindu goddess of chaos. I thought about this article for a long time after, remembering friends of mine who had gotten sober and tattooed the word surrender on their forearms—grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change… And, I thought about my friend Willow who told me to “lie down in it” when I told her the pain in my heart was at times excruciating. How does one go about practicing surrender when surrender is not in one’s nature? Write it down, Cancer, a page of what you mean to surrender.

Remember when we found a poster advertising a “gesture store” and we stood for a while wondering what we could not know before deciding to find out? How the man with the gold flag welcomed us into a ramshackle alley and two foreigners looked us over as if we were the experiment? We could have never known, hours before, that we would be perched on stacked pallets getting the veins in our feet traced by their paintbrushes. How quietly we folded into the demands of that universe, how easily we played along—teaching the foreigners a hand clapping game we both knew from childhood.

The folds in our lives are sometimes slight and sometimes so sharp they change the shape of the page entirely. You might be surprised to find that you never needed it the way it was. What leaves you, what you leave, it’s just one page of a book. Your book.


LEO

In your bathroom, I’m standing with my shoulders squared and my feet hips-width apart, breathing even breaths so as not to move while you cut the fringe on my forehead in a diagonal curve. That’s my exposed futuristic eyebrow, I explain, and the other’s my relaxed bohemian behind a curtain. You laugh and seem to understand perfectly, tufts of my hair fall on your chest and make you wooly. Hair is an intimacy, I think, my mother saved my long Russian braid from when I was a child. I would open up her chest looking for costume jewelry or handkerchiefs and come upon my own hair, a golden color it will never be again. And then, there was the way you described your dead sister’s childhood braid in your mother’s hands. A rope that lead to Jane who wasn’t.

It’s been a year today, and when I ask you about this month you say a hard month. When I think about what the stars say I think compromise, suppression, a lasting wound that shapes you.

How does one parse themselves from themselves, a bruise on the heart from all other bruises? Here I think about Stephen Dunn’s Each From Different Heights. Yes, we talked about the falsity of tender things and, yes, we know some bruises fade. But what do the living owe the dead? What do you owe the ghosts of relationships past, the girl you thought you were and the women you discovered you are?


VIRGO

On the news all morning the North Dakota Pipeline protestors representing tribes near and far, on horseback and on foot, children and elders chanting go away go away pushing attack dogs back with their big voices. I’m so moved and so menstrual, I witness their unrelenting courage and burst into tears. What comes to mind is the summer we drove through the Dakotas. The fields now flat now undulating, the sky true blue and so wide I felt like we could drive right off the earth. Wheels of golden hay punctuated the landscape and we saw a horse faint from heat. Powwow to powwow, we went looking for fry bread like your grandmother’s. You told me how you dreamed of coming back here, to help kids who might or might not be your relations—teaching them animation skills so they might tell their stories.

Today the protestors are out there again. People on horses and one man is wearing a Russian scarf around his neck for protection against mace. I imagine I am that scarf, glittering, sentinel. I imagine you there too, your strong legs braced, your shoulders squared against menacing oncomers. Then, I imagine you wherever you are in this world, watching this same video, wondering what you can do from where you are. It doesn’t matter what you held you back before, the wrong turns and false starts. If you want to be of beautiful use to something bigger than yourself, if you want to do something that matters, you’re ready. Just make sure the help you give is an offering in response to a need, a need wider than your own.


LIBRA

When I was eleven, my erotic eye opened—a butterfly—resting on beauty. That was probably how I found you, with your long black hair layered in thick wisps, your always perfect pearlescent nails, the waist band of your Adidas running pants flush against your narrow hips. You probably don’t remember that I loved you this way, only that we were different and the same somehow, only that it was good to sit beside each other, play MASH and draw flowers.

Last night at a bar full of hipsters braying about Bushwick being “just like high school,” I got my first drink with you in over a decade and outside we saw a boy I dated once that you did go to high school with and he was on a date with a girl he went to high school with. New York is a small town, all of it. “I don’t know why,” you interjected mid-sentence, “I just feel like I can tell you everything because you’re you and I’m me.” And, listening to you, I was reminded of who I had been all this time—the ineffable aspects of our characters that must have been inherent to us as children (our shameless flirting with strangers, our ability to sigh into a heartbreak and then lay it down to the side).

Sometimes, when the world’s demands feel endless and you think you must be changing into someone you can’t recognize, it’s powerful to remember that there is a core self—a butterfly—that informs your relationships to others and to yourself. That butterfly is always open to the world, she is young-hearted and easy to love.


SCORPIO

In order for the truth to set you free, you’ve got to believe that there’s only one truth and any kind of freedom but you know better. You’ve learned that no matter how true something feels, there’s always a little lie in it, or a little lie around it. That’s the bee in the honey, the worm in the mushroom. A poet I admire, a Scorpio skilled at seeing, recently complained that in her Myers-Briggs profile, she had morphed from J to P, judging to perceiving. She asserted that the P made her vulnerable in her empathy.

What’s funny, or strange, or just right, is that there exists a path that Scorpios do walk which leads them from judgment toward perception. When a Scorpio is young in their spirit, they are said to be scorpions—stingers—moved by instinct. The truth of the scorpion is a truth that pours from fear means to wound others. When a Scorpio begins to walk their path with mindfulness, they are said to be eagles. They are interested in self-awareness and precision. But they are also hunters and they don’t wound until they mean to kill. These are the Scorpios that hold their truth for a long time before burning one large and final bridge. The third Scorpio is said to be a phoenix. This is Scorpio that lays its judgment down in favor of perception. It does not mean to tell you how you are; rather, it means to see you for who you are. This is the Scorpio that knows how care for someone by caring for their damn self, how to love someone even as they let them go.

Scorpio, because fall is coming and that is kind of walking towards death—not mortal but seasonal, spiritual—I want you to think about the kind of Scorpio you are. What has your commitment to judgments (about yourself, about your life, even your workspace) held you back from? Maybe freedom begins by learning to see the many complicated truths you are capable of.


SAGITTARIUS

In Brewster NY, there’s an organic farm belonging to my friend’s family. There is a centenarian Sycamore grows right by the house we sleep in, a house so old it feels like I’m on a tour in one of those towns where women are hired to wear bonnets and turn butter. The bed I sleep in has ropes for slats. My friend informs me that these ropes have never been replaced and I go to sleep thinking about how long a good rope can last.

I did not come to test ropes or stroke Sycamores, I came because of a donkey named Romeo. At the pasture where Romeo grazes, I behold a Bay horse. What I want is to be close. The horse’s handler is away so we climb the fence, bunches of sweet grass in our fists. Neither animal is afraid but the more we touch them the more they seem to recognize us. Romeo doesn’t want my grass unless I press it softly to his mouth—which is bristly and warm. The horse knows our nature now, he nudges my friend to fetch him grass, he wants to be stroked along his back.

The horse makes me think of you, how there are times when you appear reserved by nature. Or, how you reserve yourself, afraid to give away your softness lest it makes you soft indefinitely—vulnerable and bad at lying. Like the horse, you project a kind of wall but lean softly towards a hand with sweet offerings. Imagine what life would be like, Sagittarius, if for a while you trusted the universe to protect you and you let your reserve down. What if, for while, it was you who made the offerings?


CAPRICORN

It’s the end of night and the talking has become a little laborious, a little slow, Vicky’s sipping tequila and Mina’s tattooing a slow and fine canoe into her arm. Someone begins to wonder about power and fear, how each relates and where they diverge. I’m thinking about the relationships power creates, something beyond Stockholm syndrome and closer to Kara Walker’s My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, the dependency of meanings. Who am I without you? Asks each from the other. A Hegelian puzzle: who is powerful without having power over? Who is weak?

There is book of the collected writings and statements of Louise Bourgeois lying on the table and so I pick it up and let it fall where it may. A statement she made about spirals strikes me and I read out loud:

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The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the centre is affirmation, the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control: of trust, positive energy, of life itself.

Although these words attend to power, they are not interested in what power does to us. Rather, they want to know how you place yourself in relation to control, seeking or surrendering. I want to know how you place yourself at all, Capricorn, in this moment, which is a spiral like any other. If you are retreating, know that there is no disappearance, only a point when the world becomes so taut—it is a bud at estivation’s end. When you think you’ll disappear is the moment when you’ll burst forth.

 

 

JULY 2016 Love Notes

Gala 3 Comments

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Dear Summer Hares,

Today is July 19th and there is a full moon in Capricorn. Today would have been my father’s 79th birthday so I’m thinking of him and who he taught me to be and who he never got to be and why. My father was already disabled when we came to America. He had a vulnerable heart and spent most of his time being my caregiver, organizing the apartment, and hiding needful things in useful places where we never found them again. Once, in a life before I ever knew him, he had been a photographer, a “speculator” in Moscow’s shadow markets, and an alcoholic. My mother said he “loved women” and that I must have taken after him. He spent a lot of time alone in this country and when he died, his death was just like his life here—neglected by doctors, numerical, shrouded in a language he never understood.

When I think about my place in this country, as a refugee turned citizen, as a Jew fleeing violence and a girl too gay to ever go back, I wonder what it feels like to belong anywhere and at what cost? Citizenship is dissociation, the art of forgetting: to belong in America is to forget America. What wars has this country waged for its citizens and against them? We fill our tanks, we pay our taxes. Who walks blithely over the graves black and brown bodies make—men and women both, named and unnamed? This toxic whiteness—which is not new but is also not inevitable—is a pollution we accept, build houses on, grow food in, swim. It is a thriving not in spite of death but because of it. Patriarchy—root of capitalism, which is fascism’s disguise, which claims there are those of us who are disposable—how can we extricate ourselves from its power? That, too, is a mythology our money has made real.

I spend my days unraveling, following a thread of violence and suppression that only has to whisper its presence in order to expel power over me and who I believe I am meant to be in this world. And what about you, reader? What have you agreed to so that you might feel this free?

-GR

P.S. You can support the writing of these astro-loveletters at my paypal site OR

You can donate to FIERCE instead, an organization I value in NYC
“FIERCE is an LGBTQ youth of color-led organization. We build the leadership, political consciousness, and organizing skills of LGBTQ youth.  In New York City, we organize local grassroots campaigns to fight police harassment and violence and increased access to safe public space for LGBTQ youth. ”

 

Aquarius

It was not until I became a student of women’s liberation ideology that I could understand and forgive my father. I needed an ideology that would define his behavior in context. The black movement had given me an ideology that helped explain his colorism (he did fall in love with my mother partly because she was so light; he never denied it). Feminism helped explain his sexism. I was relieved to know his sexist behavior was not something uniquely his own, but rather an imitation of the behavior of the society around us.
All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

-Alice Walker “Can I Be My Brother’s Sister?” Ms., August 1979

Today I’m thinking about the fullness of your experience, what you allow yourself to feel
and know—deep in your bones—and what you file away for a later date when you think you’ll be ready. Our books only teach us so much. And countries too, with their invented histories, their every-day pleasures and heaps of garbage, what can they tell you about your purpose in this world? Your reflection glimmers beautiful in shop windows and is gone.
I want to believe, given all this war and death and violent denial, that this summer has been easy for no one. Still, time presses down on us with her thumb and demands work, demands we eat, demands we smile when someone takes a picture of us standing under a waterfall. And you must go to the waterfall, Aquarius, no matter how broken the world. You must go to the waterfall and watch the cataract beat down on the rocks at its foot, watch the water shape them. In what other types of suffering is beauty born? And when is beauty a seed? And when is beauty a burden?

Pisces

You run the hot water over the dishes in the sink, of which there are many. They are evidence of a beautiful morning, a morning making food for a lover or a friend or your kid—who is coloring now in the other room and really only sometimes on the table instead of the paper—which is to say, evidence of your life. There is soap too, in this water, breaking down grease from butter and meat and from meals before this meal. Is this what it’s like to have a beautiful heart? Small tasks adding up to a daily life, which is not removed, which has today to worry about and tend to.

You tend to it. You pluck each dish from the hot basin and think about gloves, about needing some. You can do this. You can clean each separate thing, sometimes gently and sometimes with your elbow deep in it. This work is an offering, a gratitude, a time to think about the rest of the day and the many meals that follow this one. Not all of them will be beautiful but each one will be a choice you have made in response to some kind of hunger.

Once, life was a different room everyday. You walked in and walked out, you were always changing but nothing felt changed. These days, you walk into the same room and it is the room of yourself. In this room, you let the right ones in and you know you are strong to care and be cared for, both. In this room, you do the work, you get dirty and you come clean.

Aries

In response to a question about the future of Queer art in relation to “Society’s” progress and growing acceptance of “Others,” Avram Finkelstein, famous for his political and collective-focused art (Silence = Death poster), replied:

I think the idea of queerness as we’re talking about it at the moment, in academic circles, the idea of queerness as a way of describing otherness will always be true. There’s only room for 1 percent to rule the world. We can’t all rule the world, although, I’ve spent my life trying to figure out how we can.

And that’s what my work is about—it’s a battle, and you never stop fighting, and every time you figure out one way to navigate power structures, they figure out another way to absorb it, so it’s a constant, ongoing struggle.

The generosity of the artist’s vision, his ability to balance grief and action, pride and humility—I wasn’t surprised to find out he was an Aries. Aries, the visionary, the optimistic heart, the one who believes a skill they don’t have is just something they haven’t learned yet.

For the past few weeks your generosity has drained you. In order to care for those who depend on you, you split your world into two: creator and nurturer. You felt like you had to choose and in choosing lost sight of how—in the many other lives you’ve lived—the two not only met but also thrived at once. Aries, you maker of new possibilities, rest up and let your collective visions return to you. Imagine a life where the nurturer in you has boundaries that rise up out of love and never out of fear, where the creator in you makes art that is a reason to live in this world.

Taurus

In another world we are walking shoulder to shoulder through an exhibit called Twice Militant. It’s at the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center and it’s all about Lorraine Hansberry. We want to honor her brilliance of course, to scan her ingenious arguments for the liberation of women, black and gay in particular, her commitment to being exceptional and her suffering from it. Her suffering feels very present in the room the way genius can change the air when it is made visible.

What holds onto us, what always holds, are the secret things. The lists she wrote privately, her likes and dislikes, her contradictions and her clear river of want:

Lorraine Hansberry, age 32, 1962:

I regret
That love is really as elusive as everybody over 30 knows it to be
….
My consuming loneliness
All the friggin’ hurts in this world
That a certain lady let my letter be read!
The shallowness of the people who have come into (and lately been expelled from) my life.

I like
69 when it really works
The first scotch
The fact that I almost never want the third or even the second when I am alone. Praise fate!
The inside of a lovely woman’s mouth
The way little JW looks in the movies
Her coquettishness
Her behind—those fresh little muscles
Parts of the lingering memory of a betrayer

I am proud
that I am losing some of those fears
that I struggle to work
hard
against many, many things
and on my own
of my people

I should like
…
to be utterly, utterly in love
to work and finish something

Taurus, as this month comes to a close and the full moon rises thick with strong will, I want to imagine you writing a list. You can start with the easy things—a job that fulfills your strong spirit, when you have enough money to make time with friends luxurious. These things are easy because you know the limits of the material world. Now go deeper. To work and finish something. Now go deeper.

Gemini

You’re in my room with the door closed and I can hear the drill driving into the drywall. All day you’ve followed amiably like a bright kite string as our mutual love, my best friend—your lover, tugged us along. Here to there, this way then that—she’s the boss, even when the plan is in my best interest, even when I’m the one who said Ikea? Fort Tryon Park? She says soft serve AND hot dogs, house margaritas and a whole pizza pie.

We might have our own concerns but none of them apply. Yes bring it all over. Let’s make a room beautiful together, bending seductively over hammers.

It’s not impossible to commit to beauty, after all, to a day spent tightening and un-tightening the same curtain-hanging system. And isn’t this a kind of worship? A kind of being there for each other—the witnessing of daily tasks: bringing bags in from the rain, fumbling for the dropped screw through the under-bed dust bunnies, the sticky margaritas that splash up everywhere.

Dear Gemini, if the words that fill you now seem impossible to say, it is ok to make what you mean. To offer up the physical thing: small offerings, gentle tidings, something material you’ve imbued with love power. This is about ritual and intention. About having a clean heart. But, keep in mind that an offering won’t guarantee you anything, not love or secrets or even a gift in return. An offering is made for the pleasure of giving, the lightness of it. I see you, your Gemini gift might say, you are so important to me—this is a symbol of my gratitude.

 

Cancer
I’m listening to “Don’t Stop Believing” at my local café and the song is turned on too loud (Can one even listen to the song on low? you might ask and I might answer…yes). It’s infiltrating my mind and flooding me with images of who we were a decade ago: irreverent philosophers, whimsical radicals, patriarchy smashers. Who knew Bon Jovi could conjure up such feminisms?

Last week, I found you in the East Village and we took turns people watching. At our final destination, Tompkins Square Park, we watched a six-person cover band sing American hits. Everyone danced in their own way: one women swayed her arms up from her fold-out chair while her husband thrashed around a few feet away, a young man walked the periphery pumping his limbs in rhythm to the beat. We were talking about loss and heartache, about when what we love holds us back and when it helps us grow. We were also talking about people, the people dancing, the people we love, the people walking by with dogs that looked exactly like them.

Even though it looks entirely different than how it once did, I know I grew up in that park. I fell in love with lost girls, I thrashed around in misogynist mosh pits and I want to tell you that it’s ok, everything. That even though we’re grown up, we’re not done yet. When we were young, we felt large in the world and everything was ours. Now we are smaller and so we lose things: our old self-beliefs, the futures we thought we wanted, the parents we imagined we could have. We can’t have everything, Cancer, not even most things. But we can have a bench to sit on, a bad song to sing along to, a good friend who rubs our hand gently and says Even if it feels impossible, one day you’ll be grateful that you lived through this.

Leo

I knew I had no business there, in that stark white basement room full of bodies wringing hands and tapping feet. I went anyway. I went every week on a Thursday evening for a month until, faithfully, I was bestowed a 30-day chip, a coin with the number 1 on one side and the words One Day At A Time on the other. And yes, there was alcoholism in my family, plenty stories of the man my father had been and who my brother was becoming. But, I wasn’t there to think through either of their lives or the effect they had on me. I was just chasing a dead relationship in a foreign city and I needed ways to nurse my sense of self-worth.

What I understood: Sobriety isn’t always practiced in weekly meetings guided by a nameless God and twelve step lists. Sometimes it’s the practice of seriousness in regards to the self, of understanding emotional limits and physically wrenching restraint. I didn’t give up substances, I didn’t get sober, but that month of listening, of impromptu post-meeting dinners held in the generous homes of women with long beaded necklaces and wise eyes, drew a line around my body and defined me: a boundary between my own pain and the pain of others, the place where our lives met and diverged.

This month, I encourage you to think about what sobriety means to you. Even if you are wandering home drunk, even if the soft rattle of Klonopin in your tote bag brings you a sense of safety. I know you might be out there doing the hard work of fighting for your life. I understand that you might be nursing a soda at the bar, leaving parties early because the smell of pot is bringing up waves of nausea. But, Leo, your commitment to yourself—to knowing your own limits—is more than what substances you consume. It’s the relationships you have, the jobs you take on, the amount of time you spend sitting still within your own grief so that you might touch its edges and soften them with that touch.

Virgo

Just as I sat down to write this lovenote a Virgo texted me and asked whether or not she is crazy, a Virgo who I don’t know well, a good friend of good friends, almost family. I couldn’t give her a straight answer, mainly because I know that for many Virgos “crazy” is a loaded word and an even more loaded state of being. Perhaps it’s because Virgos give so much of themselves up to other people, their love leaks through their very presence—their hands and their good deeds. Or perhaps it’s their mutable nature mixed with their very human(e) sign that can feel nothing less than crazy when our country—and this world—feels on the brink of very great disaster. It permeates our being, this suffering racist world, whether or not we know it.

I think feeling out of place can make you feel crazy. I think buying dozens of self-help books you never finish can make you feel crazy, especially if your idea of self-help is unraveling the minds of great philosophers. I think that folding your whole self into the life of someone else, whether it is because you are afraid to lose them or afraid to find yourself, can make you crazy.

If this month of late night bacchanals and badly timed commitments has left you feeling alienated, outside of some greater picture, outside of yourself and what means most to you—I understand. Virgo, returning to yourself is a work that is never over. We fuck up, we start again, we find reasons to be better versions of ourselves that are beyond us—whether it be the work we have left to do, the people (sometimes very small) who look up to us, or all the lives that have conspired to bring us to this very troubled moment.

Libra

What’s passion anyway and who knows where it comes from? For a long time, it all seemed sort of cut and dry: some people are passionate people and some are not; passion exists in some nebulous part of our psyches, evoked from us if the flute plays just the right song. O if it were so then make it so, sister. What I’ve come to, and this knowledge was not wanted but needed, is that there is no lack of passion inside anyone and passion is not summoned from the outside by anyone.

If you want to pray to the goddess of passion on your own terms, to light a large votive candle, look no further than the face (and Amazonian everything) of Serena Williams. Libra-extraordinaire, Serena is asked to prove to the world over and over that she is worth adoration. It must be daunting to work so hard, to give up your life, to know that your own country will cheer for a stranger before it cheers for you. Watch this woman, only in her thirties, this world a trembling passionate muscle in her arms:

“I felt a lot of pressure I guess, I put a lot of that pressure on myself. Obviously had some tough losses… I had to start looking at positives and not focusing on that one loss…Once I started focusing more on the positive I realized that…um… I’m pretty good, and then I started playing better.”

Passion, you have it, more than enough—even on the days when you feel weak and small in the world. Make something. Make something everyday even if you’re feeling like nothing you do is close enough to your dreams. Focus on the way small wins lead to the big ones. Focus on Serena, or any Amazon who raises her racket and never backs down.

Scorpio

Once, in rags and mesh, you were two girls belonging to no one. The East Village community gardens were just as much yours as the open sky raining. Each night, when you ran away from your family, you ran to her little storefront teeming with roaches and radical road shows—women and books and guitars and lost cats. You were seventeen, queer, and unafraid to die. She read your tarot card under a tin tile ceiling painting dry-blood-red. Now, over a decade later, you’re sitting in a blue-carpeted living room and a Himalayan salt lamp is glowing over the Ikea furniture. It’s a different era but the magic has only gotten stronger.

She turns over your cards one by one and you know she’s the only one you trust to tell you who you’re becoming—since you’ve been becoming in front of her for so long.

Queen of Pentacles, the signifier, eight of pentacles the cross, and so it goes: a reading where the universe screams abundance and you can’t look anyone in the eye. This is the truth you’ve known all along, the only thing that has kept you going despite your most valiant, self-destructive, efforts. Whatever you believe in—it believes in you. However empty your pockets, your cup overflows. Bring the cup to your lips, Scorpio. This month, make a contract with the universe. Honor it everyday and in your best interest. Don’t let yourself down and you’ll not be let down. Promise.

Sagittarius

I’m lying alone on a beach in Cherry Grove and so far I’m the only naked one here. Both my girlfriend and I have Eileen’s books out on the blanket. She’s re-reading Chelsea Girls, which is making me nostalgic for when I was reading Chelsea Girls. It was so good all of it, the butch bravado, the playful puppy-dog narcissism. I’m reading Maxfield Parrish but the poems—there’s labor in poems—they make all these holes threw me. I just want to laugh about Sagittarian impulses like in “1969” where she wrote:

We were both Sagittariuses and had enjoyed standing outside the library at night, smoking cigarettes and talking about sex. We laughed a lot.

Ugh, and I’m so selfish I don’t care I want every life we’ve lived to exist all at once. Like right now. We could be drinking G&Ts together over a big cabbage salad while I scan your essay and you scan my third eye AND we could be watching the sunset over a strip club in LA, splitting a Xanax for the road AND you could be walking me along Coney Island beach in the middle of October and letting me kiss you because my father is dead. I guess we cry a lot too. Laughing and crying, all the women we’ve been together—it’s getting easier.

I don’t care if I’m the only naked one out here; don’t be afraid to be feminine. I’m getting up and going in the water. Can’t you feel your most vibrant capable selves returning? I feel it. Everything you’ve been doing has brought you to this moment. Don’t be afraid to choose your life on your own terms.


Capricorn

What does it mean to be self-made and how to go about the business of un-making oneself? There are pop cultural narratives of course: the overnight success, rags-to-riches, the lonely girl who got herself out of a nothing town and into the arms of a big city stud. There are narrower interpretations as well, the mural artist discovered on the street, the YouTube singer gone viral, how one perfectly crafted Tindr profile got someone their life partner. These stories serve to fill our imaginations with limits, to keep us wanting the same thing—so that we might never question what is underneath all this wanting. Narratives of fabricated lives, of blind luck, tell us nothing about the day-to-day work of loving one another and ourselves. They give us no road maps for becoming; they say sky’s the limit but they paint a sky on the ceiling over our dreams.

Well, what if our dreams are deeply rooted in one another? What if, beyond the painted ceiling there’s a universe where you and I—we can build the world we want? We would first have to look at ourselves: the person you imagine yourself to be, the unique and only “I.” Ask: Have I fallen victim to capitalist ideology? Has the hardness and scarcity of this world found its way inside me and, despite my best intentions, I have harmed more people than I’ve helped, lost more friends than I care to admit?

There will always be two sides to our lives (and maybe more, maybe many more): the side that is illuminated and the underside the floats us down this river. Capricorn, have you dealt with the underside? Seek counsel, journal your nightmares, take a swimming class. I know you trust your intuition but maybe it’s time to learn other kinds of trust.

OCTOBER STAR LOVE NOTES!

Gala Leave a comment

Dear Octo-bunnies,

Here are my love letters for you this month. For weeks I have sat before the facts, the planets and transitions, the rogue comets and fierce planetoids. I’ve taken your phone calls and cupped your questions in my palms. I’ve loved you, each and every one, intimately and from a distance.

The year gets darker, the night gets longer and, for many of us, depression lingers at the edges. But, we have learned how to be our own light when the day is not enough. Or we are still learning, or we are lost and wandering dark streets like a foreigner in the city of ourselves. Don’t be afraid and don’t get angry with yourself.

Let the long night, the shadow journey, be a kind of solace. Your time alone, your time to manifest. What comes to you might not be within your control but it is within your power. And, if you find yourself needing to recharge, lie down for a while and count each star above you as your friend.

XO,

Galactic Rabbit

P.S. THANK YOU CLAIRE SKINNER (She’s amazing, she’s a poet <3)

P.P.S OMG you should totally donate to helping me write Galactic Rabbit if you can! Because it saves me every time. PayPal!

Shout out to Kim Menig, Sarah Morrill, Elizabeth Kennon Williams, and Abby Cooper for their big generous loving gifts (amongst beautiful wonderful others)!

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Aquarius

On a celestial dance floor where the mind and the heart keep forgetting how to move together, you are the one whispering one two three, one two three. Every now and again they fall in step gorgeously, but they fall out of step too, and just as easily. You are the one guiding them back to a mutual rhythm so you must speak steady and be sure. But, what if you’re not sure? What if there are days when no amount of clear communication and processing will do? What if it’s the wrong song, a clumsy night? I mean, what if there are nights when the mind and the heart just can’t seem to make it work?

In The Waves, Virginia Woolf writes: Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

There is pleasure in pretending but there is a price too, Aquarius. Pretend long enough and you forget that the heart and mind live in one body, yours, and are always touching always signaling, always flagging what it is they’re looking for. You are the voice and the dance floor. If your heart hesitates, if your mind just can’t find a reason to keep dancing, perhaps the best thing to do is change the song.

 

Pisces

Lie back, Pisces. Are your feet apart? Are your palms up? Collect energy and rock your head. Air enters and leaves you, in with faith, out with fear. Each limb, each digit, a point of connection. In some universe, a loved one is touching the tip of you. Are you worthy of their touch? Are they worthy of you? It’s ok if you don’t know the answer is yes. Or what you are worth. Your body floating in a river outside time, river of loss and river of regret, but you’re right here breathing. Where do you need extra healing? Where do you collect your pain?

I keep thinking of fire, the image of hands rubbing together, the sound of finger print skin on palms, the feel of fat, blood, and bone within.  I find myself in the center of looking into shapes that surround me.  I attempt to make patterns, layering one into the next, often with such questions: How to participate, to point, to pull back, to listen? Where do I fit in between these tables: eater, poet, judge, hungry person, floater?*

Float, river of glittering laughter and river of soft kisses, where do you keep all your pleasures? Practice un-naming each wound and letting them go. Let go over and over again. Relax your ego and soften the heart. Long ago, you vowed to heal yourself, now move outward. Everyone you have yet to love is at the tip of you. Mirror the heavens, Pisces, and rise generous into the world.

*Ronaldo Wilson/ POETICS STATEMENT IN THE GREAT AMERICAN GRILL

 

Aries

Aren’t you the one who moved across the country with barely enough money to fill your pockets and only the idea of what freedom might look like? Aren’t you the one who wrote stories deep into the night and danced until daybreak imagining a new future, a new world full of bodies pulsing beautiful rebellion? Maybe it was easier, then, to invent the world you wanted and believe in yourself enough to make that world become. Perhaps life has been a little too strict with your young heart and asked you to prove your courage a few too many times. And maybe you are done with proving anything and angry at a world that refuses to see the work you’ve done to get this far.

In her poem “she said, meditate on rage,” Akilah Oliver writes: i am inventing. i am inventing. i am inventing a woman who i can let live in beauty inside of me. i am forsaking. i forsake myself. the scarred scared bitch who answers to my name is just too hard to hear.

Is your disappointment holding you back, Aries? Is it shifting how you see yourself and your possibilities? You invented yourself once: that lover whose whole life is a journey back toward tenderness. Tenderness as a practice in letting go when what you’re holding holds you down, tenderness like a knife at a dying deer’s throat. You’re strong enough to do it again and better, bigger, this time.

 

Taurus

There are close to 20,000 trees in Central Park. Black Cherry, Cedar and Magnolia, Birch and Black Tupelo. I know this because I looked it up. Walking beside you, under the blazing foliage, I can only call them beautiful and dying. You are like me, a city girl, and you’re still chain smoking like you did when we were fourteen and had fire red hair like this tree…. and that tree too. Years ago, on a fall walk like this one, we perched on surface roots and planned our futures. I was the selfish one, running toward whatever felt good. You bent your branches toward sacrifice “If I do this, then I can give my sister this, I can give my mother this.” And you moved toward math and marriage and money but yours was a wild heart too, an artist’s heart and it was never far behind you.

In her lyric essay “Notes from and on a Landscape: Hell, Fire, and Brimstone,” Elizabeth Willis writes:

At what cost do we separate thought from feeling?/ / What acts of will and imagination remain in the uncombed weeds of the past, beyond the histories we have been conditioned to repeat?

In the story of our lives, the narrator doesn’t have to be reliable, doesn’t have to make good on every past promise. Even if you love the work you do, even if you are good at it and are rewarded, it doesn’t have to be everything you are.  The world you chose for yourself yesterday does not have to be the world you give your whole self to.

 

Gemini 

Remember when you came over and we read poem after poem to each other? I had seen you around, had noticed your undeniable beauty and the way you always found a way to touch me, but I was careful. I was careful because you held your brightness back and I was desperate for a girl with light to spare. Still, in my small kitchen, over childhood photographs and a little bit of liquor, I was charmed by the truth-teller in you. You were a prince bearing her wounds matter-of-factly, without artifice or need, and it moved me toward you. It was not your sadness I admired, it was your ability to face that sadness head on.

In an interview with TIME, Jamaica Kincaid said: One doesn’t have to pursue unhappiness. It comes to you. You come into the world screaming. You cry when you’re born because your lungs expand. You breathe. I think that’s really kind of significant. You come into the world crying, and it’s a sign that you’re alive

If you have found yourself without words these days, Gemini, or if you have felt the weight of your own sadness like a stone in the mouth, hold on. Sometimes the words won’t come out right and what you say is nowhere close to what you mean. You’re one way then you’re another. Pursue happiness instead of being “one way.” Take time for yourself, write yourself a love song, a love song for your spirit, for your health.

 

Cancer

Remember years ago, around this time of year, when we stayed at your family farm? The days were bright with harvest and we lolled in the green grass unafraid of ticks. I want to remember more about that weekend, what kind of friend I was to you, what we talked about deep into the brisk farmhouse nights. Instead I recall two moments precisely. One: I tried to herd the sheep without you and they moved toward me terrifying like a black cloud. Two: My then-lover was living nearby and I met her outside under a full moon (yes I remember it was full). She was a cancer too, a cancer who broke my heart simply by being who she was. But who was I? I pressed the ring she gave me back in her hand.

In her essay “By Way of Booze and Broccoli,” Stephanie K Hopkins writes: It’s not in the ability to lift heavy objects or hold my drink or suck a man bone dry where I find my strength; it’s in the soft lens of recognition, in the turning toward my own fumbling self and softening, not trying to hide her. And it’s in the fluidity of self, the being able to let go of what holds us back, like myths, like what we thought was magic but was really accident, and continue to rewrite ourselves.

I’m thinking about that weekend now because in so many ways you have seen me move through heartbreak, a kind witness. Now you must become a witness to your own heart, no matter how painful that is, no matter how many truths rush toward you like an angry herd of sheep! Feel yourself moving through different kinds of heartbreak as you touch the edges of yourself, who you once believed you were and who you are capable of becoming.

 

Leo

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” I have read this James Baldwin quote from The Fire Next Time often, the words running over his pensive face in a poster or packed ornately into a pink scalloped frame. They slip into progressive Valentine’s Day cards and sweet wedding pamphlets. They compel us towards a kind of profundity, a way of understanding the vows we make to each other. Rarely have I seen the quote reposted with the words that follow that first line:

I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

Perhaps it is easier for us to imagine that love (at it’s simplest, at it’s most visible) can do it all for us, or that the passion in our hearts—our desire to be good or good at—is enough to move us toward a kind of redemption. What if we have no idea what love is (let alone who or what we are) and everything we have named it thus far has only been lip service to the god of it? What would your path toward grace look like then, Leo? What masks are you willing to take off so that you might see it?

 

Virgo

Recently, Mary Oliver—blessed Virgo poet of learning self-love—revealed a new poem coming. The lines she offered? I have refused to live/ locked in the orderly house of/ reasons and proofs.

The poem is called “Felicity,” and I am thinking of what felicity might mean for you in this celestial moment, when so many planets come to you with their blessings. What if the house you refuse to live in is the one you built and in building, loved? Yes reason, yes proof, yes order you thought you wanted all those things. You set your own rules, your own laws for the kind of person you had to be and who that person had a right to love.

When love comes and, true to its nature, it is not at all what you are expecting, what would it take for you to leave that house behind? Who will be without it? Here is your body, your handful of stars under the night sky, here is the world you wanted—offering itself over and over again. To realize yourself limitless, you have to leave the house that locked you up behind, even if you love it, even if it’s yours.

 

Libra

In her beautiful poem “Salt is For Curing,” Sonya Vatomsky writes: I don’t / feel / haunted. Exactly. More like a spice jar that’s holding / more inside than volume would suggest possible. My / little tin lid fits snug but the pressure is really something.

So I’m thinking about the spice of life and the chance that such a spice might be sorrow. So what? So what if it’s sorrow? A jar you carry with you and—you can’t help it, cupped in your hand—it changes everything you touch. Stop me if my Russian flavor is a little out of hand but here’s something the cookbooks don’t tell you: sorrow doesn’t stop you from falling in love, it doesn’t stop you from being a mad genius or knightly girl. Sorrow belongs to you, a survival tool like a canteen of water or a sword you cast through the brush.

What if you open the jar and let the pressure out? What if everything you have and everything that’s coming is yours because you have learned how to eat your way through sorrow? A spice exposed to the world slowly loses potency and after a while you can barely make out the taste.

 

Scorpio 

With the lunar eclipse, we experienced conditional darkness. Darkness like a trick, a slight of hand. If the Sun casts light on the Earth and the earth gives the moon it’s red shadow, a refraction, who is the woman standing in the mirror? There is no math in magic, no solve for X in terms of Y. One body feels unbearably heavy with memory; one looks up and sees themself small in the universe. Neither one is a liar. Scorpio, it might surprise you to find that the truth lying flat no longer concerns you. You want a truth that knows how to move, how to lay down with a lover and wake up alone without sacrificing the whole of herself. Penumbra, what is obscured and still remains, indelible planet.

“The day’s blow / rang out, metallic–or it was I, a bell awakened, / and what I heard was my whole self / saying and singing what it knew: I can.” –Denis Levertov

You can, Scorpio, you can live as both darkness and light. You can move toward love even at your most vulnerable, you can bet on yourself each time—even if the stakes are high. You knew too much, grew old too soon, now knowledge is just one way to read a map that’s always changing. Moving forward must be an act of courage, of ambition.

It’s doesn’t matter where you start. Where luck is an illusion and hard work a love letter to the firebird within you, try harder. When you lose, lose again and harder.

 

Sagittarius

One night, in a bar at the edge of town, we were talking about that one guy, you know the one, who introduced you to his wife as the girl who “wears a lot of turquoise.” We marveled at the implication, the obvious social slight. In a perfect world, I would have remembered to tell you that turquoise was a stone worn by soldiers on horseback, an amulet that protected them from falling. That it was a perfect charm for your journey.

It would have been good, then, to explore the ways in which we intuitively make ourselves more powerful. To witness our preferences in companion, work, play and, yes, even adornment as choices we have made for the betterment of ourselves.

In her essay “On Self-Respect,” Joan Didion writes: The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones’ marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others.”

Sagittarius, if you have found yourself lacking strength this month. If you have, in a sense, exhausted your social graces in an effort to be invited to the table, stop looking outward. Tell me who you are again, what you want to do in this world, show me all the tools you carry with you—in you—that are more than enough to see you through.

 

Capricorn

In interview up at Jezebel, writer Sandra Cisneros was asked “When and why have you felt most at home in your body and in your home, are they one in the same, do they rarely overlap, do they always overlap?” To which she replied, in part, “You must feel safe in your physical space. You have to have a state of safety and peace, safety from intrusion. You have to carve out private time to be your own confidant. This helps you see the beauty around you…”

I’ve been wondering about safety as a negotiation, that moment when you say I feel ugly inside this conversation- I feel unseen and untended to and the person you’re speaking to actually hears you over the voice in their own head. Safe like a space where you keep what’s valuable locked up inside yourself and every time you copy the key for someone else, every time you allow yourself to be vulnerable, you want reciprocity—respect.

Wanting that kind of safety, wanting not a warm blanket and a lover but to be loved through and within weakness, is knowing that safety is a house made out of intentions—a house we try to live in until it proves unlivable. Each time a wreckage, each time a re-imagining of shelter. Capricorn, no one can make you safe, not even you. Safety is hinged on a controlled set of outcomes and life has taught you more than once that nothing is for sure. So there must be another way to experience beauty, another reason to do what we do: love, create, go on.

 

 

MAY GALACTIC RABBIT HOROSCOPES!

Gala 3 Comments

Dear Bunny Rabbits,

Here are the little offerings I have for you this May. I love you all so much even though I have a hard time sprinkling my love around willy-nilly. That’s because you make me a little wiser every month and helps me pay my phone bill, too!

So thank you from the depths of my oceanic heart,

Galactic Rabbit!

P.S. It’s May!

P.S. Thanks Claire!

P.S. Money can’t buy love but it keeps me coming back!

 

Aquarius

Some of us were born to drag our heels along the dirt path, to slow the wheel, but not you. You, Aquarius, have an inventor’s heart. When the going is slow, you ask “what would it take to clear the path, to gather momentum?” You turn your delicate eye toward the surrounding world and decipher its inner workings.

Sometimes this drive is your saving grace, the spark that illuminates your darkest moments, the spirit that drags you out of the doldrums and keeps you in good company. Why is it, then, that you spend so much time denying your gift for greatness?

Even as opportunity after opportunity comes your way, even as love opens and closes the chambers of your heart, even after days persistent with small perfect offerings, you turn inward. You must know that you are always on your path. There is no way off. You can choose to deny your purpose or you can move forward with grace. The sun is pouring down from the open sky. It wants you to straighten your back and stand tall in the light.

 

Pisces

You’ve been working hard to cultivate your solitude, figuring out what it means to love yourself and when loving yourself is the best thing you can do. The hot water whistles and you steep the same herbs in the same cup. It’s good for you… or it’s good enough.

It would be better if you weren’t alone. Oh I know that you’re often near another body, I know that you are full of easy charm and infectious good times that draw bees to the bright pollen of you.

I admit, I am afraid of isolation,

and of the way the land breaks off here
into pieces,

and of the woman who says forever
moving her tongue along my skin
like she means it.

If I believe her, I will suffer.
If I don’t believe her, I will suffer.

(Stacie Cassarino, “NW”)

I know too, soft one, that there’s a closed door in you. Lovers and friends come and go, rapping their knuckles on the wood, peering through the keyhole and trying desperately to ascertain what lives behind it. What fear and false knowledge do you hold onto which keeps the door closed so tight? Maybe it’s time you began the slow painful work of opening. All this time you’ve convinced yourself that the ones who come will not be ready for what they find inside of you. It’s you who wasn’t ready. You’re ready now.

 

Aries

Did you see Tracy Chapman’s recent performance of “Stand By Me” on The David Letterman show? Seems to me like America must have summoned her onto that stage just so she could break our hearts a little. I’ve been listening to another Tracy Chapman song this week, “Across the Lines.” When she sings about the riots, part of me remembers the song’s release date (1988) and part of me feels she must mean these riots, in Baltimore, in Ferguson, in our hearts everyday louder and louder.

Who would dare to go? Tracy Chapman would. Because she’s an Aries. Because her heart is full of un-wavering courage.

What would it look like if you channeled the dynamic creativity you harness toward something that truly mattered to you? Why waste your time with what doesn’t inspire you? Aries, you hold in your body the possibility of uncountable exciting futures. Despite numerous disappointments, you rise and meet the day. So why wait? Failure is a small price to pay on the way toward greatness.

 

Taurus

Taurus, I’m writing you from a new cafe situated on Brighton Beach. A grandmother pushes her walker; she’s wearing a red velvet chauffeur-style cap, a bejeweled purple sweater, and there’s a white parrot perched on her arm. Men amble along with their collars starched, silk sleeves rolled up, loafers just shined. Across the street, a babushka is sitting on the cement across from the fruit stand selling intricate white wool scarves.

Years ago, everyone was talking about Coney Island. Performing rituals of closing. There was loss and long-time establishments closed but, concurrently, revived interest, beautiful murals and sculptures. The Steeplechase tower got repainted and you can see someone hammering nails into their nose every Thursday at the Freak Show.

Even after Hurricane Sandy, after so much heartbreak, the Cyclone stands, the flower shops re-open and there, right on the sidewalk, are hills of lilac wrapped in butcher paper. What I’m trying to tell you is that there are places in this world that resist devastation, people who rise up from under crashing waves with their cups full and their hair looking really good. You are one of those.

 

Gemini

It’s May! It’s May! The sun is close, the earth is soft, and flowers bow under the tiny weight of butterflies. Don’t you feel new too? I see you wrapped up in bright colors, washed clean of winter’s dust and despair.

What’s love got to do with it? (It should be about trust it should be about us, baby) Everything. Because love is beautiful and generative, it challenges us to be our best selves, to build bridges over impossible distances.

Has love made a bloom of your heart? If so then surely you must have noticed how strangers are drawn to you, how they bring you offerings in exchange for a little of your light. If love has opened you, then the world sees you open and opens in return. It gives you everything you need and more than you ever expected.

But, Twin-star, if you are reading this with a closed heart, if you are wrapped in the shadow of what might have gone right but keeps going wrong then know this: the world can only offer us what we make room for. It’s simple. The longer you hold onto what doesn’t lift you up, the longer you keep yourself at the bottom.

 

Cancer

You keep a lot inside, much more than many people around you perceive. You set the table and lay each pain separately on the crisp white tablecloth and begin to explain: when this happened, when this was said, when that was done. Emotions don’t scare you and so you find it easy enough to lay them bare like small artifacts, the pieces to the puzzle of your life. You are, in many ways, the master of hiding in plain sight. Except, of course, from those who love you, who have witnessed you separate yourself (time and time again) from your wounded parts, as careful as a surgeon, and dive headfirst into work, errands… anything that will distract you.

Do you return to those wounds at night, Cancer? Do they follow you quietly home after all your work is done? Perhaps it’s not enough to name what ails you, to reasonably state the case as one might if one were a scientist of the heart.

If I could pull you in closer I would. If I could wrap your body up in my body, if you could feel my fortitude, you might let go of yours. And then you could tell me, again, where it hurts. We’d touch each sore spot together. Here? Here.

 

Leo

 There’s this poem I used to carry around with me everywhere, a cycle by Canadian poet (and Leo) Esta Spalding. The poem, “August,” has many beautiful moments but this is the one I held onto:

You said, there are women

I know whose presence

changes the quality of air.

 

I am not one of those.

—

I want to pretend I don’t know why I loved those words for so long, that I know deep in my heart I am a woman who can, for someone—for many someones, change a room simply by entering it. Truth is, I know how to convince myself that I’m nothing special. It’s easy to believe that what sets me apart is exactly what will turn people away. Out of fear or misunderstanding, out of an inability to relate. I know too that in choosing to believe those words I choose the safety of invisibility over the risk of being seen and in being seen—loved.

When you inhabit your diminished self, when you choose to hide your specialness from the world so that those around you might be comfortable—so there is no risk of loss, you give up the chance to experience being loved wholly. You reinforce a belief (you hate to admit you hold) that being loved wholly is not for you and never was but, darling, you are wrong.

 

Virgo

Once, Virgos surrounded me. They came out of the woodwork and into my life. If I needed a romantic walk in the woods, if I wanted to make a silly lip-syncing video to combat depression, if I was filled with the sudden desire to get my nipples pierced …there was a Virgo for that. At that point in my life, I so lacked grounding and nurture, the goddess sent me a Virgo superpack. I was better off for it.

Virgo, I know that you often feel called to take care. When your paid work is done, you find yourself facing the volunteer work. When the volunteer work is done, you uncover old favors you promised to pay. And always, alongside the work you do with your hands, are the labors of your heart.

Virgo, know this: none of that work was wasted on me. Just, sometimes it’s important we let the world give back to us. That’s about trust without expectation, about believing the best in people and letting the story unfold without our help. Virgo, this month I give you permission to let the work come to you. “You have loved enough, now let me be the lover.”

 

Libra

There are people out there who have no idea who they are. They look down at their hands and see only their hands. They allow themselves to imagine what the world tells them to imagine and nothing more than that. You are not of those. Libra, you know exactly what your hands are capable of, how to fall in love with your life and love how you make a living. In fact, these days, seems to me like you know exactly what you want and like you might, with a little grease, have everything you need to work your way toward it.

Except you don’t. You know what I mean, you put on the old songs that strike up the old insecurities, you walk the old walk to the tune of someone you don’t have to be. And that’s how you keep it going, that’s how you keep your magic packed up in the back of your closet where even you forget about it. You look down at your hands and pretend you don’t notice how much more they could be doing. When people come close, you ward them off, you let them see the box put away, never what’s in it.

But you want them to come closer, need them to. Every night you wonder where your magic’s gone but nothing is lost, sweet one. Not your possibilities and not all the work you’ve done to get this far. Just take down the box and hold it like it’s yours.

 

Scorpio

Are Scorpios especially sensitive to SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) or is there another reason that the very same thoughts that made it impossible to get out of bed all winter barely phase you as summer starts to come on? You’re stirring that lemonade and letting all the sour sediment drift to the bottom as you sip sweetness from the rim.

Why not? Is there some law, some ordinance in place that mandates we crawl on our hands and knees begging for salvation until it manifests out of thin air?

If there is then you needn’t worry about it. You are the salvation you’ve been waiting for and sometimes you’ve got to stir the sugar in yourself because who the fuck else is gonna make it just the way you like it? Practicing hopefulness is work and it’s admirable. It’s OK to put planning the future on pause and focus on today. To allow for the possibility that despite everything being entirely up in the air, despite how much sour there is right there at the bottom of your glass, there’s a chance you just might be happy.

 

Sagittarrius

Once, in a PHD class on Feminist Literary Theory, a girl leaned across the table and asked, “Where is the body? Where is the body?” She was talking about the author’s relationship to the text but we rolled with it. It was a joke we took everywhere with us. “Where is the body?” we would ask each other over salmon benedict with not enough salmon. “Where is the body?” recounting sex escapades without substance, without the fruit of desire.

Sagittarius, we spend so much time, you and I, asking each other this with regard to the pulp of our lives. We forget the body itself, the flesh and muscle, the bone.

The body distracted, the body put to sleep or buzzing with anxious energy. The body rummages through empty cabinets looking for sugar. The body takes the same meal every day, sufficient without pleasure. The body, your body, needs you to return with offerings in your hands. Give it a stretch, Archer, give it a run and bring it in. An arrow can’t be strung on a loose bow.

 

Capricorn

There was a time I nurtured the wild heart in me. I fucked girls on midnight park benches and in between train cars. I held their perfect backs as they flew down long avenues on bicycles. I held on and I fell off too. I believed I was a woman with bad boundaries. That I let too many people in too close, that I had a hard time sleeping alone.

I don’t believe that anymore. I know now that wildness is not the opposite of restraint. That one can run naked through the streets and still know nothing about vulnerability. Boundaries, it turns out, are the very thing that gave me strength to love as hard as I did without ever losing myself.

Capricorn, are you sitting at home, sorting through each name in your rolodex, wondering who is worth your company? Capricorn you don’t know everything you think you know. And, you won’t find out unless you let yourself scratch beneath the surface. That means staying out a little later, getting just a little more free, trusting that no matter how wild the wind, you won’t get blown away.

April Horoscopes/ Love Magic

Gala 7 Comments

Dear Lovers,

I have inhaled impossibility, and walk at such an angle, all the stars/ have hung their carnival chains of light for me. There is a streetcar runs from here to Mars. / I shall be seeing you, my darling, there

As teenage witches, my best friend and I haunted the carpeted corners of Barnes & Noble on Broadway and 68th and at the edge of Union Square. We loved the occult section (of course) and the poetry section, regularly ferrying books from one to the other. According to “The Secret Language of Birthdays,” she was born on the day of passionate singularity and I was born on the day of passionate actuality. Passionately, we’d read ourselves out loud until we were satisfied with all we knew.

The poems were the important thing. We recited them on long dark walks through Hell’s Kitchen and the LES. After school, we hunted a language that was so big it could fill up the dark spaces we hadn’t found names for. And, although the library of our minds grew thick with writers, we always came back to Adrienne Rich.

Sitting alone, now, surrounded by her books, I am overcome (again) by her wisdom. This Taurus, this bull-headed, stubborn, beautiful poet, whose will to change was a will pulled from a well of endless love. Love for other women, love for this earth, this erring human race she reached for with an open hand. I won’t say she was without fault. Love is not pristine, not a crystal that is born beautiful and clear in the mind. It is a muddy ugly thing, a blood thing, barely shaped and grappling with light. With Venus and Mars casting about in Taurus, and Sun in Taurus on the horizon, it’s only fitting that each of the offerings I give you have a small bit of her words.

With Wild Patience,
Galactic Rabbit

P.S. Thanks again and always for all your donations. Sometimes they feel like they are coming straight from an Angel’s mouth.

 

Aquarius

Sweet one, I’m so glad you’re here. The nearness of you, your mind, which is both electric current and cool lake, awes me. Once, I wasn’t sure how to believe in you. It can be difficult for a water animal to understand wind unless the water animal learns the value of surrender. I am learning the value of surrender, how we make waves together, how those waves change the shape of everything they touch.

“No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history / or music, that we should begin with / simple exercises first / and slowly go on trying / the hard ones.”

Aquarius, what I have learned about your magic, your valiant heart, is only a small fraction of what you continue to discover. You are the seed of passion and revolution. You were born with a star in you, a star that wants to be known, a star that belongs in a tapestry of relations. In a world begging for light, you must learn (over and over) what light you have to offer. You must learn how to nurture when you feel abandoned, how to be generous when you are afraid.

 

Pisces

There are days, I know, when you feel like nothing has changed. Like the person you are arriving, is the same one you’ve always been, is the same one you’ll be when you leave. Those are the days when you choose irreverence, when you hold on to a part of yourself you’ve already outgrown so that you might not have to honor all the work you’ve done. Honoring that work would mean continuing, continuing whether or not you are alone on your journey, continuing without an end in sight.

If you feel alone, then you are alone. There are years of our lives when we learn how to be alone and those are the years that save us.

“The moment when a feeling enters a body / is political. This touch is political. // Sometimes I dream we are floating on water / hand-in-hand; sinking without terror.”

The distant future is not a fruitful promise for anyone and this world has no intention of proving you right or wrong. It can only give you what you decide you deserve, it is—believe it or not—your most steadfast witness.

 

Aries 

“We did this. Conceived / of each other, conceived each other in a darkness / which I remember as drenched light. // I want to call this, life. // But I can’t call it life until we start to move.”

Many years ago, an Aries I was dating told me that she hoped to be the kind of lover who was entirely selfless. Back then, I believed I understood something about love that she didn’t. That love could never be selfless—that to be selfish was to be human. I didn’t know, then, how to imagine god—or the impossible. Now that I’ve dived to the bottom of my darkest self, now that I’ve learned how to live without breathing, I know that love is not being human. It’s what humans aspire toward.

Selflessness can be a tall order, especially for those of us who’ve spent our entire lives sacrificing our needs in order to care for those around us. Because we are less fragile, because we know how to put pain somewhere else and wait for it to eat itself. But selflessness can also be a kind of freedom, a meditation on forgiveness.

Selflessness could mean the difference between being right and being loved.

 

Taurus 

Sweet bull, last night I took too many stimulants and stayed up late reading and re-reading Adrienne Rich, writing and re-writing the same sentences. I lay awake, muscles twitching, listening to the squirrels meticulously scratching their way into my home.

“I am an instrument in the shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations / into images     for the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind.”

What is a body, Taurus? This thing we haul out of bed, rinse and empty? All my life I have been shown how to care for it, eat the right things, move enough. All my life caring for it was not the same as loving it.

You store your treasures in tough boxes, take the glass from the edge of the counter, and polish what needs polishing. Taurus, in caring for yourself, you are re-entering a web of connectivity. Your physical presence will reconstruct your mind. There will be days when touching yourself will mean inspiration; there will be weeks when tears will emerge as a new language.

 

Gemini 

“when I think of landscape I am thinking of a time. / When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever. / I could say: those mountains have a meaning/ but further than that I could not say. // To do something very common, in my own way.”

My Tender Prince, your star is so bright these days, I feel illuminated just looking at you. You, more than anyone I know, have learned what a year is made of. Who was that dark cloud moving erratically over the blocks and avenues? You wouldn’t even recognize her.

She was doing the necessary work of shifting so much sadness from her heart.

I love your will, the way you build the space rocket piece by piece before setting off for the moon. The way you trust your path—even when it’s uncertain, even when all forces seem ranged against you. Magnolia trees bloom in early spring, before their leaves develop, and in late summer—after full leaf development. Perhaps you missed your first chance to open, to bring all your color to the world. I know that you can feel summer coming and summer is your season, you’re ready now.

 

Cancer

Today winter is a hush sound over Lake Seneca and there are crocus coming up, bright and without responsibility. We are not like them, simple with beauty. We must live through every season. I want to walk with you down the rock path by the water, hold your hand, small gesture.

I know you are heavy, see you straining with the weight of responsibility, the suffering of those closest to you. Family relations are not fixed; they are vulnerable to the people that choose them. They are subject to waves of chaos just as much as they are places of refuge. More than that, they are a part of us, something that can’t be erased with busy schedules or distance. Your family isn’t what you’re doing; it’s who you are.

” …No person trying to take responsibility for her or his identity should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.” In the dim light of evening, when your work is done and time sits still between us, I am waiting for the opportunity to hold you up like you have done for me time and time again.

 

Leo  

Once I adored a Leo boy. In winter, we walked the Coney Island boardwalk and took our love slow. For my birthday he gave me a tiny jewelry box. Inside: a blushing porcelain rabbit and a long rusty nail. His love: so precious I couldn’t stop imagining it breaking in my hands. His love: drove right through me, sharp and without compromise. He was bipolar. He told me he was undeserving of love. He called himself a god and I worshipped at his feet.

“this we were, this is how we tried to love,/and these are the forces they had ranged against us,/and these are the forces we had ranged within us,/within us and against us, against us and within us.”

When I write you about this mad love, it’s only because I want you to know that I see both sides of you, the rabbit and rusty nail, the fragility of your affection and the iron-strength of it. Each time you have loved, each time you have been the lover, you thought you had to choose. You don’t have to choose. If you can learn to love as both, the ones you love will honor both. If you can learn to love as both, you won’t have to lose.

 

Virgo

In the middle of the city is a verdant field; in the middle of the field is your body. Through your body runs a heavy branch, a branch the fell from a powerful tree, a branch that belonged to your ancestors and also to no one because it is made of what you are made of. To get this far, you’ve had to protect that little piece of life in you. You’ve employed deliberate coping mechanisms that allowed you to feel in control. But, you can’t control your relationships. You can’t control how you are seen and how you are loved. All you can do is drink the light and water around you and use it to grow.

“what in fact I keep choosing//are these words, these whispers, conversations/ from which time the truth breaks moist and green.”

When you speak your truth, not what you want to believe but what you’re afraid to admit you believe, buds break from the branch and open like small green promises. Sometimes the truth might feel ugly, unmanageable but aren’t you tired of carrying the hardness of winter inside of you? Be warned, Virgo, it hurts to bloom, each opening a small wound and so delicate.

 

Libra

A woman outside is pushing her walker through a half empty parking lot. I watch her from the third floor of the room I am sleeping in. I feel her look up at me, or she feels me looking and there we are, watching. She moves on and I turn back to my friend who is doing yoga stretches on the living room floor. To see someone is an ordinary thing. Everyday, we take each other in. These are already moments of love, small openings we create in ourselves so that someone’s humanness can pass through.

“Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream or in this poem, there are no miracles?”

You’ve been waiting for the big sign, the promised thing, a bird with your life in its mouth. I’m not saying it’s not coming but what if it’s not coming? What if all you have is this ordinary life? There must be something beautiful here, your beloved brewing your tea, your cats preening on your lap, your limbs stretching out with their fleshy mystery. There must be something beautiful here and if you can’t see it right now—that’s ok. It sees you.

 

Scorpio

When your heart breaks even though you thought heartbreak was impossible, consider your heart. Consider the wealth of it, how it pumps blood everywhere like a perfect engine, a hungry mother in the kitchen. Lie down. Lie down and don’t move. In the kitchen of your heart, a mother lies down and the tile is cold.

Maybe this is what love is. The opposite of death, a constant hunger. Maybe you are stronger than you ever imagined yourself to be and all the secret small regrets you’ve stored inside have taught you how to forgive, have made a good animal out of you.

Your heart breaks and you close a door. A new door is possible. “…The door itself makes no promises / it is only a door.” You know that you’re leaving, you just don’t know what’s worth taking with you, what you’ll need. Scorpio, there’s always more on the other side. You just won’t know what’s there until you walk through.

 

Sagittarius

It seems like I am always in a car with you. You’re dropping me off or picking me up. You’re driving me across this country, amnestic with dead cotton fields and corn rotten in the ear. In the small privacy of this machine, you’re telling me the story of your life, or your day, which is emblematic of your life. I know I am taking care of you with my listening, I know that now is the time for feeling not acting.

“Until we find each other, we are alone.”

Sagittarius, I know that in doing for others you seek to understand them but it’s not your job to protect everyone you love, it’s not your job to uncover everyone’s small pain so you might feel it for them. No one expects that from you, certainly not me. I want you to know that I see you trying, working doubly hard to overcome your own disappointments so that you might be a good partner, a good friend.

Let’s just listen to each other for a while and let that be enough.

 

Capricorn

Dear Sea-goat, it’s true that you have psychic powers, that the river of this world pulses right through you and onward. It’s true that when I have spoken badly of you, I felt your face enter my mind like a warning, a librarian leaning over the stacks and shutting me up.

It’s true that you are capable of great generosity, that there is a healer in you, that you are the one who taught me how to poultice a wound and sweeten lemonade just right.

“Only our fierce attention / gets hyacinths out of those / hard cerebral lumps, / unwraps the wet buds down / the whole length of a stem.”

I won’t deny the good, how it comes in waves, how it cloaks you in a rich colors. It is what keeps those who love you close. But there are those who leave, who refuse to stay, who see the unkind parts of you. In your worst moments, you blame them for their leaving, you throw up your hands, dress yourself in one thousand masks that only a hint at your real face. But at your best, you are a fighter, a soldier of love, a woman without artifice who is willing to change so that she might protect what means the most to her.

Don’t let your ego get in the way of your heart.