Tag: Queer Astrology

Galactic Rabbit January 2017!

Gala 3 Comments

Today, having just fallen off the edge of 2016, I’m wondering about the power that we give years. We open and close a chapter of our lives based on a number imagined in the mind. But, there are so many markers we can set our years to. For those of us who are teachers, the year begins every September and the end is summer, an unclaimed time measured in how many weeks before the water is warm enough to walk all the way in. For those of us who dip our apples into honey, Jewish New Year came in October and the lunar year is now 5777 (which, by the way, adds up to the number 8—a number that indicates beginnings and endings). Chinese New Year is at the end of January but we won’t leave the year of the Monkey for the year of the Rooster until February! And, reader, I will let you know that I just began my Saturn Return a couple months ago, so everything feels like either a door on the verge of opening or a house that’s been lit on fire.

Whatever 2016 has meant to you, whenever it beings and whenever it ends, whatever happened or will happen, a year is only a river made of days—the girl in the boat rowing along that river, she is the mystery. Where did she come from and how long has she been coming? Was the boat given to her or did she build it herself? And, how did she make it so far down the river? And when, if ever, does she raise her oar so that the current captains her?

What I mean is, even if you are grieving an intimate loss, even if the oldest bones in you ache with fear waking into this political climate, life has to be lived before we can know what it is*. And we can still make something beautiful together. We can defy separation. Even through the thickest, darkest, clouds of fascism, we can look up to each other, we can fall in love and rise in resistance.

With Adoration,
Galactic Rabbit

*Lisel Mueller, “The Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley”

P.S. THANK YOU Claire Skinner, poet & clairvoyant extraordinaire for being my first and best reader.
P.P.S. IF you want to support the writing of these astro-love letters, you can donate here.

 

AQUARIUS

Have I used the phrase “pilgrim soul” when I’ve written to you? Today as I sit in the golden light of a house in the woods, I’m thinking about that William Butler Yeats line “but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.” I’m thinking of your pilgrim soul, which is to say—a soul that journeys to a sacred place to practice worship.

It’s just that I’m beginning to feel like maybe any place where we can be together without fear for the safety our loved ones is a sacred place. And since our country is not that place, since most countries are not, we must create sacred worlds together. We are charged with making the voyage and the destination.

An architect must know a strong foundation when they see one, Aquarius, and you are the architect of our resistance. Just remember, before you begin the arduous task of mapping a world where joy is a seed in everyone’s backyard and the skylights show us unconditional heaven, you might spend some time learning what a good foundation is worth.

And, that means that there will be days when you will have to learn how to feel when the ground is crumbling under you before it crumbles. And, what that means is ,there will be days ahead when fortifying the support systems you already have in place will be your best-laid plan.

 

PISCES 

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the life-force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

-“Uses of The Erotic,” Audre Lorde

A wound calls for care so the wounded tends to it, or learns to. It isn’t easy, after all, to care for oneself. The puncture grows smaller over time, barely visible, but the memory of the puncture—its impact and its consequence—the memory can grow large without regard to time.

When the wound’s call was deafening, how did you care for it? Did you seek relief in the arms of others? Did you lie very still and run your hands over yourself, thinking “I am here, I am here, I am here”? Did the past year teach you that relief comes only when you are ready and readiness will look nothing like what you imagined?

And what is the erotic if not a working toward opening? Here, the lover enters through the wound and their entrance is both a salve and a reminder. A salve is not salvation. The wound’s call is subtle now, but it is no less powerful. What can it teach you about your purpose here? You will learn how to gather your life in your hands, you will learn how to answer the call. You will be the one who tends the wound always, but how you tend to it will change. Pisces, you grow strange and you grow stronger.

 

ARIES

Once, when the heart was young, the heart did not wonder if love was enough. It loved. It pumped so fast, you were running across wild grass, toward someone who loved you or you were the field and the heart of all things pumping. Once, the heart was young and love was enough, the world was so many tight buds opening and you were a part of all that, fragrant and damp with opening.

I promised you a love letter, but I don’t know what love is. Each to each, bodies cleaving in the open yard and under dark heaven, a panting gesture we have waited to make all our lives. You begin in the garden of love and it is a garden of possibility. Each seed is a promise, an ambition, an idea that could go either way. A girl crawls on her hands and knees through the garden, she says, “look, I crawl on my hands and knees—I make a path in the dirt, follow me.”

You are the girl in love’s garden but to feel love is not enough. The garden has its own ideas. The roses shoot vines that trouble the house, wisteria threatens the pear tree which—if you are not vigilant—drops overripe fruit to the ground and invokes swells of bees. Aries, I promised you a love letter, can you show me what love is? Who will climb the ladder and gather the fruit before it is wasted? Who will cut the roses back, carefully, trading wildness for sustainability?

A girl on her hands and knees in the garden, you buried your heart in the rich earth of your devotion. Whatever grows thrives or dies there, is your charge.

 

TAURUS

Well, the new year started well enough. We were under the open sky, surrounded by pines, in a hot tub that, after many hours of prodding and tinkering, had gotten sufficiently hot. Midnight was ten minutes away and you insisted we go inside, so we went inside. I guess that’s when things got tricky, I don’t know. I’m always watching you trying to figure out what you’re feeling and you’re always watching everyone else with a calm and closed face like the guardian of pleasure.

Of course, there was an argument. There’s always an argument but this time something was pained in you, a radiance of disappointment or discouragement. We dug in, you with your passionate resistance, me with my—yes I’ll admit it—condescending patience. And, here is the place where I love you most, the force of your certitude up against your will to change. You refused my language but you’d kept asking questions anyway.

And I guess I’m still learning about you, your incredible devotion to ideas, which once accepted become part of you—a driving force of change. And, that is why you’re not easily swayed, why shades of grey seem like a weak strategy in a world where you have had to bet on yourself over and over, to be strong because weakness was not an option.

But, Taurus, no matter who you think you are or how you think others see you, the world builds itself around you in a gradient of offerings. The more you open to others, the more they understand you. The more you let the world in, the more pain you feel, the more beauty.

 

GEMINI

During her speech while receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Gemini writer Svetlana Alexievich said:

“It always troubled me that the truth doesn’t fit into one heart, into one mind, that truth is somehow splintered. There’s a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the world. Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I’m interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history. I am often told, even now, that what I write isn’t literature, it’s a document. What is literature today? Who can answer that question? We live faster than ever before. Content ruptures form. Breaks and changes it. Everything overflows its banks: music, painting – even words in documents escape the boundaries of the document. There are no borders between fact and fabrication, one flows into the other. Witnesses are not impartial. In telling a story, humans create, they wrestle time like a sculptor does marble. They are actors and creators.”

She was speaking of being a war writer, of writing humanity back into the brutality of war. Tonight, I’m thinking about the truths your heart knows, the small daily ones and the larger ones that direct the compass of your life. I am thinking about your ability to collect fragments of a scattered life and make something remarkable out of something ordinary.

Once, everyday opened into a new idea. I thought, this is the kind of person I am meant to wake up beside. We were artists without labels, we made what we wanted to see, we learned how to do it on the fly—or we taught each other. Now something like a snow cloud. You rise, you meet the day, move forward, but who are you—what are your hands for?

Content ruptures form yes, but internally and externally. Do you feel a kind of inside outside dance, your inner tumult crashing up against the world, chaos? But, you don’t have to suffer to know who you are—it’s not a job, a lover, a sentence written on paper—it’s a beautiful mystery you have to claim every day, like the sun rising, for as long as you’re alive.

 

CANCER 

Oh, it’s a trial, being so tender and so tough, I know. On the days when my heart gets too soft to bear the world, I remember my Cancerian father. I remember his soft watchful presence, how he aimed to take care of me. I remember our long walks along the beach together full of open-hearted talks and, also, his powerful rage, which never erupted. Rather, his rage closed all access to him; he would tighten his mouth and utter what was unmistakably the “final word,” then quietly leave the house not to return for hours.

From him, I learned the impact of being quiet and showing pointed restraint. I learned how to hold my most vulnerable self back when it was threatened, even subtly, how to punish without words. It was only after he died, after my girlfriend left, after a long time of trying to open myself to love again, that I learned how much impact all that distancing had had on me. Most of the time when I grieve my father, I grieve a man with a secret heart. I know he loved me more than life itself, but he never knew me—because I never let him.

Cancer, when you refuse access to your heart, no amount of crying or processing will ever soothe you. And, the strength you feel inside your armor will be a temporary strength, or a strength borne by isolation. When you open the door and let your loved ones in, you will find that you let yourself in, you get closer to yourself.

 

LEO 

When one animal lives in a dark forest, her heart is a jam jar filled with ruby jewels. For a long time, the animal did not know herself from the forest and so she could not imagine her own shape. She tried to draw the outline of herself, her boundary, but the line kept running out and into shadows. When another animal came, let’s call him animal2, she wasn’t surprised. A forest is made for many animals and her jam jar, a beacon. She said, “come by my fire, animal2,” and he sat there. She offered him some jam and he ate all the jam.

A boundary breached in the emotional body: an alarm sounds in your spirit, a powerless anger.

Our animal grew hungry and resentful, still the next day she offered up her jar again. She said “I have some jam to share but it’s my only jam,” animal2 ate all the jam. It made him sad to make sad, but that’s the kind of animal he was.

A boundary broken felt through the body, an ache, a sense of shame, a resentment in the gut.

She said “I won’t give you jam if you don’t leave me some” still he never left her any and she always gave him jam so her words had no power.

A boundary is a protection spell that only works if you honor it. There is no power in a name that is written in sand.

Our animal’s heart was an empty jar she collected tears in. One day, animal2 came to our animal, he said— “Can I drink those tears?” And our animal handed over her jar, thinking he might know her heart and be good to her. But when the last tear dripped into his mouth, the outline of our animal softened and disappeared until animal2 was the only animal left.

Leo, to offer oneself, one must have a defined self, otherwise what you offer is what you might not be ready to lose.

 

VIRGO 

In the car with my best friend’s mother, we wondered at what make a 15-year-old girl leave her home and a mother who loves her. What I offered her was an answer I would have offered my own mother. It had to do with the secret life of children, a life we take for granted, which is invested in perception and accumulation—change. I know all immigrant children have a different story but here is something I found shared, we did not choose to begin a new life—a new language, a new culture—it was chosen for us and it was something we were sent to do alone. We were given a mission but the closer we got to accomplishing it, the further we fell from our origins and consequently our families.

There were days when love was enough to tether us, and struggle too was a kind of adhesive, but there was also disjuncture in love language, something lost in the translation between individual difference and culture imitation.

What was lost comes back around, Virgo, and you will find that the child you were—the one who moved through this world despite your family and in step with them—is the adult you grapple with. The way you see your failures, successes, your belief in love’s power and love’s shortcomings, these things are in conversation with your origin. When the conversation becomes heated, when you feel the untenable tension of who you were born to be and who you have become, running will seem like a good option. But, Virgo, you should stay, you should put the bottle down. That child you grapple with is the one who needs you most.

 

LIBRA

All your life you’ve been looking at an image of scales and told to identify with it. But what is a scale? A means of measurement. An object attempting at balance.  A sculpture made of chains, cups and lever, dancing. An implement of comparison and exchange. And you? Are you the scales or the keeper of? Do you walk through world seeking inner balance, shifting weights from one side to the other, or do you stand still before warring sides and weigh each opinion, mediating their actions and declaring their worth? The scale is an altar where justice is observed but not where it lives. This, the eternal question: what is balance in an unjust world and how do you, Libra, determine the worth of an exchange which is never equal?

Today, on a car-ride to Philly, I was reading an old issue of NYRB where (Libra) Maya Lin takes us step by step through the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I think it is important that all artists read this text if only for the line “I had a simple impulse to cut into the earth,” but here is where I thought about you and about us, about the choices that get made for us when we forget what to believe in:

There was always the expectation that since the war had been controversial, the memorial must be also. It wasn’t so much as artistic dispute as a political one. The choice to make an apolitical memorial was in itself political to those who felt only a positive statement about the war would make up for the earlier antiwar days, a past swing to the left now to be balanced. It was extremely naïve of me to think that I could produce a neutral statement that would not become politically controversial simply because it chose not to take sides.

You are always taking a side, Libra, even when you perform the dance of hesitancy. The life you want to live, a life that thrives on beautiful risk and Amazon idealism, it needs you to choose it and keep choosing it even when it feels impossible. The storm clouds are gathering and something mighty comes, you can bring the scales if you want, but you can’t stay still.


SCORPIO

Outside, for the third time today running errands for someone you love, you wonder what drives you toward service and what is it about you anyway that makes your kind of caretaking pass invisible under the radar of those you do it for? Is it to your credit that the work blends in with daily life? Not bold or showy but, rather, small adjustments attending to the foreseen needs of others. And are you really so kind, so generous with your time, so attentive to the lives of others, or are you simply wandering through the world trying to prove to yourself that you can be of use?

Nevermind, the coffee shop you set out towards to get the espresso you want is not serving espresso, do you want hot chocolate? No, you don’t want hot chocolate or tea or regular coffee besides this isn’t for you it’s for someone else and someone else is back at the apt waiting for a latte. You find the next coffee shop. The line is long. It’s ok, you can wait. You’re very good at waiting. You’re waiting for the coffee, you’re waiting for your life to change into a life you love a little bit more. Just a little bit, you’re not unrealistic.

Ok. You have the coffee, you got yourself one too—you’re not inhuman—make sure not to get them mixed up, some people like to complain when you get mixed up and if they complain you’ll take it personally. Do you take things too personally? Maybe it’s just that you’re spending all your time and energy and sweetness on everybody else. And then, when you’re alone with yourself, you’re too tired to check in and take care of the one person you keep forgetting about—yourself. So, take care of yourself. All these tiny gestures, all these small ways you try to soften yourself for the sake of others, are you telling me you can’t devote at least one act of love to yourself every day?


SAGITTARIUS

At one of the last surviving diners in Manhattan, in the very back behind scattered tourist families, upper west side morning joggers, and wayward teenagers clearly cutting class, I wait for you. We’re a sight for sure, you suffering from what appears to be the direst cold known the mankind and me, hungover with period cramps. We groan toward our food, order omlettes with “home fries” and “cheese” and are of course rewarded with ambiguous orange goo and browned mashed potatoes. Water comes about halfway through the meal and we’re basically guzzling coffee to survive. Still, through our individual pain, I can feel the soft relief of company. What is it about communal suffering? Is it the act of witnessing? You recognize my pain and allow me the opportunity to move beyond claiming it.

Alright, so to suffer best we must suffer communally. Red tent, Shiva, or two girls eating unnameable cheese at noon on a Thursday. But what about the general malaise we have no rituals for? The “I’m a directionless, poor, woman who is moderately depressed” malaise, the “Sure, I’m in love with my husband but that is literally the only sure thing in my life” malaise, the “I don’t know how to be in a relationship with anyone, probably because I have no idea how to be honest with myself about what I need, do I need something?” malaise.

In lieu of Dayquil for the Soul, which will—you know—not be made in this lifetime, it is up to you to come up with rituals for obtuse suffering. What I mean is, build a community around you that recognizes your sadness and your joy both, allow people to see your full spectrum of emotions, allow yourself to feel them. And who knows? Maybe in the blue tent where we just listen to sad songs for a few hours every week, a voice (a song? a story? a friend?) might embolden you  to discovering your own cure.


CAPRICORN

The first time I heard the song “Wild is the Wind,” it was a recording of Ellison Glenn made for a cd of poems. The recording was not a poem. It was a drawling, crying, voicemail for what felt like a sweetheart but could have been a love letter to their most broken self. Love me Love me, say you do, my best friend and I sang it to each other—it was our crush language, our lost lover language. Like a leaf clings to a tree something delicate and undeniable.

When this year ended, I was with all my friends in a house in the woods. We said let’s play the dead and cued up George Michael, Leonard Cohen, Bowie, and Prince. And then something happened to me, it happened to the room. David Bowie came on the screen singing “Wild is the Wind.” My heart stopped. Because it was aching, it made me ache. The words from his mouth were not words but whole ghosts springing from his face like cast off masks. And it was tense, one string in his throat about to break.

I looked at Bowie face and thought to myself—this—this is what a Capricorn is—a soft sweet howling through ancient trees, a determination to enter the room of love and divine worship no matter how steep the cost or how difficult the journey. There was something patient in the ghosts that flew from him, something vulnerable and unable to forgive itself. And maybe there are things in this world that Bowie will never have forgiveness, he’s just a star now—a dead star. But you, Capricorn, you who are still here, still wind howling through trees, still a leaf clinging to this life—forgiveness is something you can learn. How to give it, yes, but mostly how to receive it.

 

 

Galactic Rabbit September. 2016

Gala 3 Comments
396917
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:

cell-xxvilouisebourgeois-2-638
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.

 

 

Galactic Rabbit April Love Notes!

Gala 1 Comment

 

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Dear April Bunnies,

This month I have held each of you close to my heart. I have written tiny ideas in my IPhone notes while on the train to work. Have dog-eared books and magazines. I’ve paused mid-conversation in sticky bars to write down the revelatory truth of my friends’ experiences. Yes, there’s no point in arguing with an Aries and there’s no point in trying to push back against that Moon when the pull is so strong. Just go with it. You are having a Sagittarius Problem, I claim tenderly to my sweet friend when she needs to be validated about her social graces. We laugh about our wounds like we’ve just discovered the fussy old things.

Maybe April was the cruelest month for T.S Eliot (possibly for Chaucer too) but if it is cruel then the cruelty is a beautiful stretch. The month opens and our muscles ache and limber. In waking from winter, we take the world in and all its buds prescient with bloom. These love notes were seeds once.

Now they are ready to be yours.

With Spring Sweetness,
Galactic Rabbit

 

P.S. If you’d like to donate to the making of these horoscopes, you can donate at my PAYPAL!
It means a lot to me! I love you!

P.P.S. If you have written me a letter, I will write you back. I am just very slow due to a panicky nature.

P.P.P.S. [Thank you, Claire Skinner, as always. You are the best psychic and even better friend]

 

Aquarius

At the Key Food, with six dollars to spare, I’m desperately rifling through old bunches of kale in search of the most vibrant one. I’m starving and haven’t really eaten a full meal in two days. One of my hands suffers the inevitable cold mist while the other cradles a phone to my ear. My sweet friend is going through her first big breakup and this is the third evening in a row I’m trying my best to say something that might be of use.

We’re on opposite spectrums of radiance, my friend and I. My heart—a soft black stone with a bright red crack; hers—a brilliant clear prism refracting empathy and pain (which is also love). I want to tell her All true love must die, / Alter at the best / Into some lesser thing. / Prove that I lie. But one does not quote Yeats in the hopes of lifting a spirit. Not unless that spirit is the republican spirit of the Irish. Besides, I don’t believe those words completely. It’s just safer for my already ravaged heart if I live like I do.

Dear Aquarius, wherever you are tonight, no matter how little you can understand of what has pushed you to this precipice—this edge—you are powerful enough to face it. Your inner knowing—listen to it—it will get you home. Even if you have start again, even if that home doesn’t exist yet. What I come to, besides a less-than-choice wilted bunch of kale, is that knowledge will not do. Or, to quote yet another wizard (Kierkegaard): Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

 

Pisces

That is what I want of you—out of the sight  & sound of other people, to lie close to you & let the world rush by. To watch with you suns rising & moons rising in that purple edge outside most people’s vision—to hear high music that only birds can hear—oh, my dearest, dearest, would it not be wonderful, just once to be together again for a little while? / / (Just as I wrote those last words the muezzin began to cry his prayer from the little white minaret—he is still singing—) / / One is so silly, isn’t one?—Listening to him it seemed that he was calling us to worship—heaven knows what—something that we both hold dear.

Dear Pisces, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but quote the whole of that text from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s (PISCES QUEER WITCH SUPREME) letters to Arthur Davison Ficke (SOME DUDE).

Today, as I lie in bed under my ever-flourishing asparagus fern (who I have just decided I will name Edna), I am thinking of you and your soft green heart. Green because I can feel it flourishing too, even if I am far from you. Even if you have never kept me close.

Oh I know these past few years have made a mess of you and, if you are honest, you might say that there have been times when it was you making the mess. Don’t bristle. We can all be toddlers sometimes when we enter a world that existed long before we arrived. Adjustment can be difficult—especially if it feels like you are the one making all the adjustments. Don’t believe that, Pisces. You must learn to be the kind of lover who balances devotion and independence both.

When the universe, when your work, when your family, your lover, made space for you—they had to carve a space out of their own lives. There will be times when you feel the enormity of that offering and there will be times when that space will limit you. Both of these emotions come from within you and are a beautiful challenge, a call to worship something you both hold dear no matter its difficulty.

 

Aries

Old patterns, no matter how negative and painful they may be, have an incredible magical power — because they do feel like home. – Gloria Steinem

The problem with being the kind of person who builds her home in someone else’s love is that it can be hard to look that home over for repairs. Especially if this has been the year when, time and time again, the labor you put into your partnerships eclipsed the work you still have to do on yourself.

Love, partnership, collaborative creative venture, these are fulcrum and catalyst to our personal journeys. Yes, we have soul mates and witnesses and lifelong accomplices but make no mistake—your journey is about no one else. Yes, there will be times when it feels like the fastest way toward your destination is to satisfy everyone else’s expectations of you, to perform a kind of work around the needs of others without ever really getting to yourself.

Aries, you can build your home in someone else’s heart but don’t confuse their heartache for the faults in your foundation. Learn to listen deeper for floor rot and roof drip, it’s not unfixable. Imagine yourself the carpenter of your home, which is to say, take care of yourself.

 

Taurus

Everyday, I climb a long staircase in a building devoted to artist studios. Halfway up, my eyes rest on a landing where the words “nobody loves no one” are written in thin letters on the wall. Of course this reminds me of you and that birthday not so long ago when you drove clear out of our tiny town to spend a few hours listening to Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game.

No, I wanna fall in love (this girl is only gonna break your heart) / With you. / The world was on fire and no one could save me but you. / It’s strange what desire will make foolish people do.

What I love about that song and what I love about you is the way contradiction lives so passionately in your spirit. Last week, I spent two mornings with you. During our first breakfast, you were overworked and over stretched, guzzling caffeine and my reassuring words. The next day, I was running late—frazzled by roadblocks and bad money. “Even if you’re late, just come,” you said. “It’s nice where I am. Peaceful. I’ll buy you breakfast.” And, it was peaceful: my Bloody Mary perfectly viscous, everyone laughing about how crazy everyone is as our eggs popped over our hash browns.

There will be people in your life, people who see the caregiver in you, who will take advantage of the part of you that gives too much. They don’t know, and you often forget, that it’s the vulnerable side of you—the side that aches to be held and cared for and adored—that holds your most enduring and sweetest magic. Now that you have learned to discern the intentions of others, you can better share your sweetest self with those who will nourish you.

 

Gemini

Last night I spent the evening with a three-year old girl, an air sign although not Gemini. We played all the usual games we play when I come to babysit: Play-doh cupcake factory, tickle monster, and my favorite “Where do these toys go? Why don’t you show me?” After a considerable amount of time clearing the floor while shimmy shamming, my young friend wanted to play a new game. The object of the game was fairly simple: She tucks me into a “bed” on the couch and I go to sleep. No I don’t get to put an arm over my eyes. Yes, I must hug this dusty stuffed sleep buddy. Her mama and abba kiss her before bed so yes here is my cheek. Then she leaves me. She leaves me on the couch and part of my job is to just lie there and wait. She’s gone for much longer than you’d expect, pressing little buttons around the apartment, arranging her construction sets. The object of the game (for her) began to clarify: to be in control of one’s solitude while maintaining connection.

Lying on the couch with the sun beating on my eyelids, I thought about how difficult it is to tend to our relationships without cultivating strength in our solitude. What I mean is, how hard it is to be fully present with someone else even if that someone is fully capable of seeing you and celebrating you for exactly who you are and what you have yet to actualize about yourself.

Let me just propose to you, for argument’s sake,
(I do, after all, wear perfume even when you’re away)
that my problem with Love is that it doesn’t signify
in anything but a series of contradictory analogies
that happen to turn me on.

We want our relationships to be beautiful sentences that go one forever by some invention of punctuation, to never feel run-on. But we fragment, we destabilize alone like dependent clauses. You are always an important part of the game and meaning exists, Gemini, when the sentence is not beautiful. The subject (that’s you) must lie down in the sun and wait to be beckoned, but the subject is active and valuable, is an expert at play.

 

Cancer

The word of the day on my computer is sovereignty and Leonard Cohen is singing “That’s No Way To Say Goodbye.” Why does heartbreak never feel old, no matter how many times you go through it? When I was bright-hearted and in love, I sang this song to my sweetheart on mornings when she was waking beside me. When we were far from each other, I sang it into her voicemail box so that she might hear it when she longed for me. Well you should know that our love was great since my singing never was and she still listened.

I’m not looking for another as I wander in my time,
Walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
It’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea…

Relationships change us and in learning to build a world with someone (or someones) else, there are parts of ourselves that we tuck away—parts that don’t quite fit into the blueprint, that don’t fall in rhythm with the daily work that is a shared life. These parts learn to live in the shadows of the lovers’ psyche, to speak in low tones and walk softly.

It’s these shadow selves that rise smoky and thick in the throat when there is crisis, when the world you have built with the ones you love is no longer the one that fits your needs. Listen to these parts of you for they are sacred parts. They will teach you how to fight for your big love as your truest self. They will teach you how to fight for yourself.

 

Leo 

When I get to your apartment at 10 am so that I might welcome your incoming renters, the previous ones are still there. They’re a handsome couple, straight, a political critic and a composer. English isn’t their first language so they smile at me every couple of minutes. The two of them are late with their check out yet they move slowly, ambling in and out of the bathroom, murmuring in the bedroom, shuffling their bags closer to the door. The time crunch makes me anxious and I lie down on the couch, still half asleep myself. It’s early evening in Russia and I wonder what you’re doing there.

When the couple finally shuffles out into the living room, I climb the ladder to your lofted bed and begin the surprisingly difficult task of changing the sheets. The guy pokes his head in and remarks, “Eh this is hard!” Then he points to the instructions you left for them. Next to my number, the words best friend. “Good friend! Ha ha!” he exclaims. “Sure,” I reply, thinking about all the times the year when I needed you and there you were. The least I can do.

And that’s how it is when you ask for exactly what you need. No matter how difficult, or how early for a nightowl, the people you have taken care of will take care of you. This is more than reciprocity (although it is also that). This is about trusting that the love you give to those who are precious to you, the amount you extend yourself, it’s precious to us and it’s never wasted.

 

Virgo

Once, when I was breaking up with a lover, or a lover was breaking up with me, I flew across the country to haunt her. I housesat and couch-surfed and when I was selling poems or starving myself, I was reading Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson. That novel saved something in me, some bright light that was edging towards being doused, and when I was done I gifted it to the woman who left me.

About a decade later, I saw it at a friend’s house and decided to re-read it. I wanted to see how it would affect me now, what work it could do on my very different heart. It was a book that I remembered as difficult—linearly unwieldy, untrustworthy narrators, a constant shifting plot. That might still be so. It is also a book about beginning with loss. A book that takes an orphaned heart up into its arms and teaches it songs of survival.

The stories I want to tell you will light up part of my life and leave the rest in darkness. You don’t need to know everything. There is no everything. The stories themselves make the meaning. The continuous narrative is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark.

We tell our stories so that we might find the root, the reason why we came together and the reason why we failed. We think that we might use the past as a light to see, a little lamp as we dive deeper into big commitments, generative life endeavors and all the Big Things one learns to take on.

The past informs you as long as you keep returning to it—examining, turning over—and it is important that you do. This will ultimately gift you wisdom. That said, it is also important to honor this moment, as it is now, its own story with its own light and gorgeous revelations. This will grant you eyes with which to see in the dark.

 

Libra

Dear friend, If there were such a thing as saving someone–what I wouldn’t give to save you from your amorphous sadness. Whatever animal you keep at the spine-rock of your skeleton, sucking the song of your marrow dry. If I could coax it out like a wild thing from dark cover, give it sugar and sweet words. It loves a soft hand but not as much as the knife’s edge, I know.

…

13th street starlets
fan their lashes curbside, holler

Get it, honey

which I take to mean
quit sleeping easy

& shimmy down a backstreet
to slip off last year’s
sweetness & reserve

The wanting itself
suddenly enough.

*

But, there is no saving anyone else–no person or job or city or angel that will serve as an escape hatch from yourself. Perhaps one doesn’t save themselves anyway. Rather, make it your mission to consume every little bit of who you are–the parts you offer up and the parts you are ashamed of. Practice touching your body, your spirit, and your creative force without judgment. There is a future in that desire, a world you deny yourself that wants more than anything to have you.

*Alina Pleskova

 

Scorpio

I read this study a while back about how girls are done a disservice in their formative years. How they are praised for being talented or smart rather than acknowledged for the hard work and effort they put toward achieving their goals. For this reason, many girls grow up to be people who are afraid to go outside their comfort zone and develop a new skill lest they be found out: not smart, not talented enough. Instead, they limit their opportunities and their chances to thrive as deeply engaged and driven adults.

I don’t know when it began for you, dear Scorpio, that sinking feeling that maybe there are people in this world who never get to live up to their full potential and maybe you’re one of them. It’s easy to cite moments of trauma: loss of lovers, loss of family members, loss of self. It’s harder to look firmly at your life and consider that self-doubt was something ingrained into you. You must have been a powerful child, perceptive, quick to engage whatever text was set before you. Someone, or many someones, taught you to doubt that power in yourself, to imagine its source outside you rather than within you. Someone taught you that the world would either grant you favor or not and if you didn’t have it then—you sure as hell won’t have it now. But those people / institutions were wrong. You can earn the favor of the world simply by deciding you will work hard enough to deserve it.

 

Sagittarius

It’s just like we’re in Jane Austen novel, you say to me as we depart from the airport in our Lyft. I agree; my hands clasped tight with excitement in my lap. We take in the wide expanse of Los Angeles, the meaty thruways and old punks with loafers. Our rented room is four flights up the stairs and our guide gifts us a bottle of wine upon entry. Once he leaves us we try on each other’s various dresses and impractical shoes, trade jewelry and lipstick. We take relaxing potions and set the scene: our three nights devoted to social grace and intellectual hunger.

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings / Mansfield Park /Austen (Sagittarius)

Despite our crisp petticoats and perfectly poured martinis, it’s the end of the night and the mornings with you that sustain me. Our play marriage entirely Bostonian, our bodies un-touching through the night, yet you dream that my dead father comes to you in a gesture of sweetness. When I arrive at the house gate at 3 am and a stranger approaches me, it is you rushing down the stairs exclaiming I know I should have put on pants but I mean to protect you! When, in the morning, you burst into tears over the busy nothings waiting for you at home—the work you do that goes unappreciated—I tell you I mean to take care of you. Beloved friend, I know you are good at pressing on. Tell me what ails you anyway, so that I can care for your heart while you walk your path toward self-empowerment.

 

Capricorn

There are certain kinds of knowledges that readers take for granted. We know, because Zora Neale Hurston told us so, that there are years that ask questions and years that answer. But, how does one live inside a year that asks questions, that just keeps asking relentlessly. The year touches your shoulder in the morning as you wake, the year tugs you toward the same breakfast you make everyday of your goddamn life, the year is with you filing your taxes and folding your clothes and goddamnit the year won’t shut up.

Were you made for the consumption of a world that does not sustain you? Were you made to serve any one person or revolution without first learning how to care for yourself? How can you care for yourself when yourself is splitting apart? Are you tough enough to live through this? When you live inside a year that asks questions, you are the one with the answers. The year that asks questions pushes you forward but it is not in charge. You are. You make the rules.

 

 

February Lunar Love Notes!

Gala 3 Comments

Dear February Rabbits,

 

Because I am Russian/Ukrainian and grew up in Little Odessa By The Sea, Brighton Beach, I have looked forward to the Lunar New Year for as long as I can remember. Starting January first (inaccurate, I know), old men with furred hats would roll out their carts full of that year’s animal from the Chinese Zodiac. Aunts and in-laws would arrive at our apartment with tiny charms to dangle from our wrists or cellphones. There was magic in those small charms and a ritual power I grew up belieiving in. Some winters ago, under a full moon, my mother told me that her older sister Anya would raise her fat beaded purse to the full moon and waggle it chanting “Goddess do you hear me? Goddess give me money!” That is why this weekend I bought two gold coins molded with monkey images, one for me and one for a friend. For money. For luck. For welcoming whatever comes next with red hot energy.

Welcome the Aquarian New Moon, lovers, and the year of the Red Fire Monkey. The year when all the work we’ve done, all the drudgery and mud slapping, gives way to clarity and swift rewards. The year that each tiny revolution in our spirit will bring forth magnificent consequences.

 

All Charms Come To You,

Galactic Rabbit

 

P.S. THANKS CLAIRE SKINNER! Again always forever.

P.S. Thank you all readers for your love notes and support and yes I screenshot each one and save it and look at it when I’m sad.

P.P.S. If you’d like to contribute to the making of these horoscopes and my Red Monkey Year, here is a little link: PayPal!

 

 

 

Aquarius

In her essay “Other Balms, Other Gileads,” about being positive, and queer, and poor, and fucking run down, Bryn Kelly writes: Does the soul, which has been degraded by poverty, by neglect, by racism, by homophobia, the soul that has always been told it has nothing to live for, now, somehow, have the promise of tomorrow? Of hope and everlasting life?

Yeah, right. Gimme a break. She wasn’t born yesterday. But she has to admit; it all has a certain resonance.

This summer, in order to take regular breaks from a bad living situation, I frequently slept over at my friend’s apt. Every morning, she would leave early for work and I would descend the bunk bed (that she built herself) slowly, carefully. At ground level, I’d come face to face with a light box, an index card tucked in its corner. On the card, written in rainbow pencil, was my old mailing address and the sentence When you lift someone’s load, you don’t allow them to expand. These two notes seemed purposely paired together—where I’m coming from and where I’m going. I wondered if sleeping at her place, if finding relief instead of solving the issue—was my fear of expansion.

My avoidance, my lack of trust in my own ability to thrive, I inherited them from my mother, from poverty, from a country that never wanted girls like me to succeed. With depression, suffering is a speculative genre, wherein we all attempt to catalogue the heaviest weight so that we might shrug it off. It’s harder to chart the loss we endure from years spent under a rock, expanding. The people we forget we have every right to be. Still, I think it only fair that you try your best, Aquarius, to find out just how much this past year of endurance has taught you. Test your limit. You’ve made it this far so why not go farther?

 

Pisces

You call me and night fills up with the crackle of your laughter. Every person that has done you wrong, every bad turn, you roll them like olives on your tongue and suck the pit right out. In a story we tell ourselves when we are afraid to grow: we are always the ones hurt, we are always the ones abandoned, we are always the ones who lose. Stories, like prayers, are more powerful the more we believe in them.

When you say—I am the one love falls from—you open your hands and let go. You compromise your heart in order to protect it and then you are the one love falls from. But what if I told you that you are not that one? What if, all along, the world has been asking you to hold on a little harder?

Pretend memory is not a

hangover. Find a cure. Viola Davis my way

through a room with no wig. Call you bigot

to your face. Keep my hunger for pushing

my fingers against the wall of a lover’s writhing.

I’m feeling myself on the dance floor,

in the bedroom of my witching hour. 

What if the story of your life was not about suffering for the sake of benediction? Imagine a world wherein you have always been strong enough to forgive whatever harms you. It can be hard to finally feel strong but, Pisces, you are different then you once were—kinder at the core and luminescent. I wish you could see with clear eyes the many ways you were cared for—each of us your mother as if we knew how to be mothers.

 

Aries

How strange this silent longing for death,/ as if you could make the sun not come up,/
the world’s wheeling and wheeling its seasons/ like a cruel continuation of stubborn force.

I just took a break from writing horoscopes to make my very first ever batch of Rice Krispies treats. Melting the butter slowly in the pan and cutting the big puffs into smaller puffs, I thought about time—how it slips away from us or how we try desperately to get ahead of it. It was a funny thing to do—cut marshmallows into quarters—they stuck to each other and to me. Still, I kept doing it, one after the other. Days are like this too; we cut the whole into halves and smaller, smaller, trying to make something easier, to separate the ingredients of ourselves from ourselves.

Bear with me while I make a sudden turn. The crispy mess that might be a sweet tooth’s heaven is cooling in the refrigerator and I’m trying to tell you that the time you put in doing “the work,” no matter how tedious or seemingly unnecessary, it was not for nothing. Each gesture toward self-care: the exercise regimens, the therapist appointments, that time when you chose a little sanity over a little money.

But that’s not how it happens. Instead, light / escapes from the heart’s room and for a moment / you believe the clock will stop itself. Absence. / You see: light escapes from a body at night / and in the morning, despite the oppressive vacancy / of her leaving’s shadow, light comes up / over the mountains and it is and it is and it is.

It matters, the small things we do for each other and ourselves so that life can be a little brighter—a little more bearable.

 

Taurus

“Writing is not the body. Neither is the house. The body is the body.”- Claire Skinner

I have a secret dream where you come back to me. My face is covered in mascara and you clean it off slowly with wet fingertips because this is a gesture of love we both understand. It doesn’t matter who I was crying for because you are the answer. You, and your beautiful hands I have always loved for their elegant power to tend or to quietly refuse. In the dream, we ride down big avenues on a bicycle. The basket is alive with blooming and the wind is your hair. We never go anywhere; we never grow up into women. We ride and rest, our hips spreading into the earth and over each other.

In a series of poems about altars, or bodies, or the living space made sacred, Kristen Nelson writes: Akilah, what are the limits of the body? The first time she asked me, I said: The body is limited by our own expectations. The last time she asked me, I said: the body is limited by who we allow to love us.

You have tended to your home, Taurus. You have tended to the roots—the elders and the ancestors. You have been meticulous, picking your poisons with careful intent and your body wants to love you back, wants to feel like it too is a sacred altar in which you live.

In my dreams, each gesture of love is a candle I light for your pleasure. In this world, I hope the light in you burns bright into the night and beckons. Let healers come, let lovers come.

 

Gemini

A few weeks ago I agreed to join a small coven. What I mean is: a group consisting of my lover’s wife and one of her closest friends and me. Because women in proximity are always each other’s teachers, the three of us chatted naturally on Facebook about what we might bring to the table. One asked about building psychic barriers and the other wants to practice empowering each other. These are the two skills that make friendship powerful and witchcraft even more so. I don’t yet know what I need to learn so I’ve begun reading Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark.

“When we devote our best energies to what we most cherish, when we refuse to let our energies be diverted to further destruction or to serve other people’s end, we tap into the power that creates the everyday miracles of birth, growth, and change, touch the fires that have not cooled since the beginning of the world, shift the very plates we stand on so that new continents can form.”

Starhawk is a Gemini and I’m convinced all famous witches are Gemini (cough Stevie cough), which means I’m convinced that you, dear reader, are meant to be famous or at least very very bright in the constellation of things. So bright that when you approach the wrong girl in the wrong bar, you somehow get half a sandwich out of it. So bright that even if you are sick right now, even if you can barely leave your apartment, there is a party outside time where people are dancing beneath the image of your glowing face.

If you were to be in my coven (if you are in my coven) then everything you bring to the table, when you have the energy and even when you don’t, is something of great value.

 

Cancer

In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes: The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion.

I think we were taught that love comes into our lives to hold us and I won’t tell you that’s a lie. Rather, I want to propose that learning how to love is the journey we’re after. And I mean it in the biggest way one can imagine. Learning to love our families even when they can’t love us in the ways we need, learning to love our partners without judging them for the ways they haven’t yet learned to love themselves. And, above all, learning to love ourselves enough to demand more when what surrounds us is not enough to sustain us.

The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

This is a journey that will bring you to your knees with regret—and with pleasure. We create the path we roll down and we never stop rolling so it’s important, Cancer, that you remember the part you play in our own undoing. It’s important that you say out loud what make you feel good, what harms you, and when you are sorry.

 

Leo 

Remember when you were my professor and I’d watch your dogs, DVR The L word, and read your how-to books on fisting while you were out of town. I’d walk around your apartment and think about how much care you put into each rug and note of color. Your refrigerator plastered with photographs of a young dyke and lithe gay men—Fire Island probably. I was looking for a photo of the woman who broke your heart, the one who let you get away to that sleepy college town we were both in.

I am astounded / by the various kisses we’re capable of. / Each from different heights / diminished, which is simply the  law. /And the big bruise / from the longer fall / looked perfectly white / in a few years / That astounded me most of all. *

I was thinking of that woman when I called you from San Francisco years later. The sun was pounding over my head and I cast a long shadow demanding you tell me whether or not I would be heart broken forever (what I meant was what I thought I knew about your heart). You laughed at me and told me to go dancing.

But I didn’t go dancing, I was heartbroken for months, I kept crying in all the wrong places and still, I know I carried your conviction with me. Not that time heals all wounds, as they say. Rather, that wounds are just wounds—we can cry about them or not and no one is made the more honorable for doing so.

* “Each from Different Heights” Stephen Dunn

 

Virgo

One winter, long before we ever broke each other’s hearts, we walked along a Finger Lake quietly knowing each other. I lived in a town under so many stars and you were the best one that ever came to me. The wind was wet and alive against us so we climbed into the back of your card where the seats were gone and it was like we’d kidnapped ourselves. No. Something less menacing, a glitch in location in order to pause time.

I don’t remember why you were crying—or maybe you weren’t crying—maybe I was just beginning to understand the shape of your face in a moment of anguish. You told me you wanted to write stories. I asked you why you weren’t writing stories. I don’t think I ever got an answer.

Removing the notion of forever (-f) allows, ironically, for forever to emerge: The sky is, in this sense, as deep and wide as it is deep and wide. To understand this: Imagine blood vessels, say, broken in an old lover’s eyes

I hope that wherever you are now, you are making exactly what you love. I hope you are surrounded by people who value you, people who can read the pleasure and pain in your face without a moment’s hesitation, who feed you when you are hungry. Old love, if that is not the case than let me remind you, stress is a symptom not a root. Don’t confuse anxiety and fear for personal failure and don’t define yourself based on anyone else’s dreams but your own.

 

Libra

You said that there was a time when we could have been more than friends—that winter years ago when you drove hours out from the city and towards my sleepy town cloaked in blizzard. You brought me three mix cds I couldn’t listen to; at night we curled around each other and slept. You whispered, “this is nice” and I said, “this is something we can do.” I felt relief—yours, mine. I said there was a time when we could have been more than friends—that summer years ago when we pounded Four Loko on a dark stoop and took off our shirts dancing at Outpost. Phone numbers rained from our pockets and we crawled on the dance floor toward music (each other).

I’m incredibly powerful in my ignorance. I’m incredible, like some kind of fuzzy star.
The nonsense of me is the nonsense of death, and
Oh look! Light through the trees on the lake:

the lake has the kind of calmness
my pupils’ surface believes…and this is just the thing
that the boxed land of shades at the end of the remote
doesn’t program for: the lake is so kind to me, Amy,
and I’ll be so kind to you, Amy, and so we’ll never die:

there’ll be plenty of us around to
keep casting our inquiry
against the crisp light. Light is all like,
what’s up, I’m here I’m an angel! & we’re
all: no you’re not, that doesn’t exist. We all laugh and laugh…

Or cry and cry.

I don’t know what more than friends is. I love you in that queer way of two intimate bodies hurtling in a shabby car towards nothing in particular. Two stars hanging precariously over the same ocean of lovers. All these years, tenderness without knowledge, the both of us dancing to seduce no one in particular. Old friend, I never knew you. Tonight I want to know who did. Whose hand have you let reach deeper than the first sadness and into well of you? Old friend, love pours like water around your mouth. In order to drink, you must open.

 

Scorpio

Because there is a wound in the universe, a wound appears in us. Yes, all stars in relation, all pain—a belt of pain. Scorpio, you are the one who prays to stop feeling so much so much—and it’s private, the praying. A wound is tight inside your chest; a stone that glistens when wet, appears soft. Before, when it was easy to be cruel and you were interested in the easy way, you’d ask your lovers to heal that wound in you. Now nothing is ever the easy way so you sooth yourself.

I’m awake / no one is here–no one is ever here / the affect is very no the / affect permeates me deeply. thats why Im a rock Never use the word ‘is’ / the therapys to move the rock, render the affect flexible Why bother Nothing / wrong with rock, sings a rock You are not stone not stone soul, sings another thing / Yes I am Dont cry youre not allowed to. I will cry stone / I’d rather be stone than their imbecile. *

Solitude is powerful but there are other ways to feel strong. There are nights when a body can be with another body—a beloved—and each hour will lie down upon the hour before fingertip to fingertip. Whatever joy there is left on Earth (in the wake of intimate loss, of haunting loss, of violent public spectacle) it hums between them. Keep listening for that hum, Scorpio. There will be months when music is the only thing that stays with you—so gather it up inside your bones with listening and be grateful.

                                                                                                   * “Love” from Benediction by Alice Notley.

 

Sagittarius

There are days when I live in another universe where you are very much near me. We go to that place we like and order the same big vegan salad, extra dressing, extra pico, extra big smile in the hopes that something gets tossed in for free. We order gin too but later. Or maybe you get gin and I get whiskey but the important thing is we’re going to write all evening and take up lots of counter space. We’ll swap work and praise each other’s very brave hearts.

But, in this universe, you are far from me. In an email to you, I write: Have you noticed that when you sleep, nothing makes you sad and nothing hurts? Yes, you write back. My inbox is full messages with your name and the word Yes.

Such a hurricane/ Such a hurt and pain/ Trapped in my soul and I can’t explain.

So many nights I have called you with burning anger, you are the only one I seem to trust with mine. I read you an offending correspondence and you gasp with indignation. You teach me to be gracious in response, to never give away my power. In the business of being a better friend, I kindly request you show me where you keep your anger. Let me hold the ruby jewel of it to the light and give you clarity. And, when that anger pains you, let me praise your sharp mind, perceptive graces.

 

Capricorn

A long time ago, a psychic told me that I use a lot of reserve energy. I had never heard the term before but the moment he uttered it, I understood it perfectly. I understood that, for years, I’d been running on energy I didn’t have to spare—energy that I wasn’t generating for use. Instead, I was tapping into the core resources of my spirit, shifting from depressive lows to survival mode just to catch the bus or finish a project.

A goat moves up a mountain and toward a cooler altitude, looking for water. She is a marvel of gravity, a vertical dancer, hooved acrobat. She knows in her bones when a storm is coming, when it’s safest to nestle in the crag’s natural shelters. She knows when climbing toward what she needs might cost her more than she’s got to give.

Because our bodies teach us new things every day, because we were not made to work flawlessly forever into old age, and because caring for yourself can often feel like a luxury many of us can’t afford, you are no stranger to running on reserve energy. I understand. Capricorn, this month, I want you to imagine a place inside yourself where you keep your strength—emotional—physical—spiritual. Imagine it is a beautiful box. Mind how often you must open it, how often you replenish what you take.

 

 

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