Category: abuse

Moon Phase

jmckenna

An old, old one. Still timely, and more so.

Moon phase

1. You’re purple phase: strapless, lavender, violet ‘P’ necklace, quilted, plum ankle-straps. Or the silk, mulberry and gold, backless. When the time came for me to wear it, I didn’t. You unpinned the shoulders to match your mouth.

2. In a rage, home late, grabbing me from sleep, wrenched arm, dropping the dresser drawers out on me. Refold, refold. And when all of the tissues in the wastebasket reappeared: “not used enough.” You didn’t speak to me for weeks. Mercy.

3. But your back broken now. The right side inches above the other. Your hips are turning around on you, spine craning your head. A mess of moles marking. When did they come? You climb into bed at every chance. All those times I stomped on cracks crying & what you will do.

4. There’s something small, & spun. Thinner than nerves, it lines and wonders at you like things you know from white-haired women, and what my Grandfather smelled like. How you can make everything work like vulnerable swaddling, what all your hands can hold, my hope. And before boiling my bath, before my skin at the second degree: something like a nectar clinging to the insides, ensuring it works, then burning.

jmckenna

The first half of the movie A Quiet Place is the closest thing I’ve experienced to an accurate metaphor of what it’s like living with C-PTSD. It’s like that, all the time, except no one is there with you, or understands at all.

Friends if this is also you, you might want to skip it. Personally, I found it relieving, less isolating, to see something portray this experience.

part company

jmckenna

then the ground

was shatter and smooth

over something harder.

the same as my chest

filled up tar molasses;

before that, heavy cream,

sand, ornaments.

 

I pointed up, slow,

second place fireflies–

my body strobing

memory drum and limp nails

on floorboards, the ceiling

hit between tasks,

time measured off.

 

a heat register’s cloud

and fall from standing–

speaking glued shut.

synapse panicked syllables

a metronome’s tick

repeating at the tremor

 

 

(2004. 4 of 28 drafts I’ve never done anything with, being resolved into notes and outlines.)

post, eclipse

jmckenna

8 Strength, Vertigo Tarot
favorite card from the Vertigo deck, which i’ve had forever and never use

I always like to think I’m sitting eclipses out when I don’t have a lot of activity in the houses they are occurring in. I never am. It’s never true. I did get through that New Moon Cancer one in early July pretty easily, but in general, I always, always rue that thinking. What a shocking, but also amazingly verdant and unfolding few days.

Things I’ve learned include:

  • EMDR is strong fucking medicine, and now I’ve had cause to see how far reaching and transformative that work can be, how it can work when you dearly need it to. As trauma healing modalities go, by far one of the most potent.
  • Related: no matter the context, men showing how they can soft-land combination punches on your head, face, and body and ultimately render you powerless, is always vibrantly ignorant and tone-deaf, and always requires divorcing from logic the fact that the woman in front of them has almost surely experienced assault and or trauma (conservative numbers, 1 in 3). You aren’t showing us anything we don’t know. You are just re traumatizing and entirely part of the problem.
  • People are hereby paying me to talk with me about tarot and astrology, which my friends are surely breathing a collective sigh of relief about.
  • The riskiest thing I do is go running in wooded areas alone with headphones on and I will not give it up.
  • I’m writing a sprawling essay about the indulgence of obsessive grief. I don’t know what will come of it or if I’ll end up abandoning it, but it’s the best thing I’ve written in a while. It’s an idea I lived for a long time, by grace was able to move out of, and now look at from a distance. I don’t know if Candace coined the term, but I’m betting she talks about it in the podcast with Sarah, here, which I still need to listen to. And, I’m betting I interpret it pretty differently than she does.
  • I dance exactly the same way as I did and always have. In a way, it’s such a relief to know. Like learning I can still fluently speak a first language I never have occasion to use. And, ‘Strict Machine’ by Goldfrapp will always get me to any dance floor, sidewalk, tiny clearing of floor space, at anytime, always.
  • Related, I have no idea how I used to dance for 4-5 hours straight, 2-3 times a week.
  • Tiny, ash colored spiders keep dropping onto me.
  • Everything is shifting.

Anyone who needs a single podcast that will rock you: This is as controversial as tarot gets; this is strong medicine, tarot related or not. These are a lot of things a lot of people don’t want to hear but are true. It’s partly why I don’t believe in, or practice, predictive tarot and it’s why I don’t do ‘Does he / she love me?!’ tarot questions… those are the wrong questions.

Other podcasts of note: Inside Jaws. Ear Hustle.