Skeleton of a lamb, but with wings, and during The Troubles.
A bombed high-school at night with a hole in its side; we rebel into enemies. One of us, outnumbered in a room, and too few reinforcements rush by.
At the window exit, the ossein lamb. Its rib-wrungs and bleached skull wag, motions for a boost.
Smiling at me, it flies out, bone wings dispel the devils.
On the grass expanse, so few of us now, but her resurrection, and her short voyage.
With thanks for the out of bounds angels, poets with visionary limbs, the manifesting ultra pisces, the old woman in the purple jacket’s hand on my canary sweater, and her fine hands holding my head, my knees, this hound, that child.
What is a wound but a flower
dying on its descent to the earth,
bag of scent filled with war, forest,
torches, some trouble that befell
now over and done. A wound is a fire
sinking into itself. The tinder serves
only so long, the log holds on
and still it gives up, collapses
into its bed of ashes and sand. I burned
my hand cooking over a low flame,
that flame now alive under my skin,
the smell not unpleasant, the wound
beautiful as a full-blown peony.
Say goodbye to disaster. Shake hands
with the unknown, what becomes
of us once we’ve been torn apart
and returned to our future, naked
and small, sewn back together
scar by scar.
I mean, as long as we must be here – our emotional innards scraped raw and smooth like a pumpkin’s hollow – we might as well use it.
While I work now, I watch different versions of Wuthering Heights. I’m trying to watch them all. There are a lot. I’m looking for something, but I’m not sure what. It’s something about younger me, something that slipped off and fell. I’m trying to figure something out, methodically tendriling through the floor of a dark lake, searching for something rare I lost. I’m not sure what. A will or a desire or a spark, perhaps.
One of the times I miscarried early, I was alone on the floor, losing it, writhing in pain. Both of my dogs stood over me. The one, the small one, the Pisces Moon, concerned and tending me, the other, staring at me, her will and force telling me to get the fuck up.
I didn’t read Wuthering Heights until my late 20s which was like reading under a spotlight just turned on, angels trying to teach me something, pushing my head closer to the page, saying ‘learn.’ Wuthering Heights should never feel autobiographical, and, one should never have to consider the cost, decades later, a cautionary tale you arrived at too late to heed. What was dropped in the process of faith and karma, twinning and isolation, toxicity.
This protracted Scorpio season due to Venus’ retrograde through, then Mercury, now the Sun, has stretched our emotional excavation past a short season into an extended exhumation. Denying the work would only leave us lingering in ignorance later, less transformed, less faceted than we might shape ourselves now. That doesn’t mean it’s emotionally without cost. Excavating in the dark means we’re residing there, feeling our way versus seeing any dangers. We need to go back for everything we forgot, pick it up, or at least gather it so that no one else can have it without our consciously sharing.
– – Joyelle McSweeney
I’m the matron-king of hell In yoga pants and a disused bra for a laurel & shatter the scene inside your simmering year Like a ransom scene filmed through shattered transom I smear in my glamour I make as if to justify the ways of God to man That’s my ticket in That’s why God lets me speak here Crystostoma’d on his couch Even though I’m derived from Hell Hellish Helenish Hellenic I’m the hanged man in this version pegged up in mine pegged jeans by mine ancles, an inversion mine manacles are monocoles I spit out the key and squinny through the keyhole back at the unquittable world In my rainment of gummy sunglasses and crows wings for epaulets I delicately squawk from the edges of things balance unsteadily on the bust of the goddess squawk: Aeschelus Euphorion Aeschelus Euphorion &: I’m going to tell you something so bad that when you hear it you’re gonna know it’s true. Like all the worst stories It comes from the heart & it goes there too. Back here in St. Joseph County a struck duck flies crown first into the asphalt and is stuck there with its brains for adhesive like someone licked the pavement and sealed it a postalette with its cartoon feet in the air and its Jeff Koon wings that’s roadkill for you: realer than real and the cars mill by with their wheels in reverse heavy as chariots in a dealership commercial and I am walking my dog by the river a matron from hell look on me and despise I am like the river: thick as beer and with a sudsy crown there polyethylene bags drape the banks like herons and a plastic jug rides a current with something like the determination that creases mine own brow as I attempt to burn my lunch off the determination of garbage riding for its drain hey-nonny it’s spring and everything wears a crown as it rides its thick doom to its noplace gently brushed by pollen by the wings of hymenoptera like a helicoptera performing its opera all above Indiana bearing the babes away from their births to their berths in the NICU in Indie-un-apple-us Unapple us, moron God, You’ve turned me Deophobic the greasy tracks you leave all over the internet the slicey DNA in the scramblechondria the torn jeans panicked like space invaders in an arcane video game oh spittle-pink blossom the tree don’t need nomore shook down to slick the pavement like a payslip you disused killer app each thought strikes my brain like the spirals in a ham pink pink for easter sliced by something machinic each thought zeros in flies hapless and demented festooned like a lawn dart finds its bit of eye spills its champagne split of pain then we come to our senses suddenly alone in the endzone
Rodney Gomez
Lately I have been a gap.
Moth clouds follow me to bed.
I counted them: twenty, fifty, block, choke.
In the room where I used to sleep
a breath hangs low on the bed
and hoarsens the room.
No one knows where the air is
charged and released into the world,
but it thistles.
This is how breathing fills a house
with family: breathing to draw
the buzzing to its source
and breathing to lacquer a plugged maze.
How a house fully beamed and walled
is not a house, but a husk.
How a life in the span of a few breaths
becomes a clockless thing.
I learned how to cry finally a couple of years ago. I’m trying to find out if I can make it into a super power. So far I’m still really very bad at it, but Mr Rogers, everytime. Thanks for this waterworks grenade, search engine corp. Between this and a ‘They Grow Up So Fast ‘ video compilation of photos of my child stored on google, I guess I’ll just go for the hat trick, rewatch Dear Zachary, and call it a day. (p.s. no one watch Dear Zachary unless I’m with you to hold you and bring you tissues.)
Well, it finally happened. Today when I arrived to pick up my son at school one of his school mates pointed at me and yelled: “A WITCH! A WITCH!” then ran away.
Out of the mouth of babes. 😂
I mean, I’ve been waiting decades for someone to realize 50% of my aesthetic is just a low-key Miss Switch cos-play.
Sun in Cancer season is always a lot, if different than other emotional, water sign seasons, like Pisces and Scorpio. Things we consider permanent or safely sunken parts of our emotional landscapes loosen with the emotional tide, and are deposited on the shores of our consciousness.
If Pisces is our subconscious, intuition, and dreaming, and Scorpio is pain and passion lurking in the shadows -secrets made painfully known, stinging truth – Cancer is our own emotional way of being in the world, what we hold in, the crying we do alone. Cancer is our vulnerability we try constantly to protect. With water seasons, I find it feels similar to being thrown out of a boat in turbulent water — don’t fight it, imagine your body as driftwood, go limp, go with it, and you will rise right up. Just ride it out. Fight it and at best the waters will fill your lungs, distended your chest – expanded with the weight of salt water.
Think first of Cancer, the crab. Its hard outer shell holding and hiding tender insides, able to scuttle in all directions, perceiving, darting up and down – peering out and descending, and the pincers that grasp and do not let go. Apply that to the emotional functioning of Cancer as a sign and you can see how all of theses things (as with all signs and their pros and cons) can be gifts and detriments.
Cancer is the only sign ruled by the moon – by the divine feminine, by constant flux and cycle – usually partially shrouded, and briefly, fully illuminated, then changing again. And, because the moon moves so quickly, and of course visits the sign every month (*every month*, no other sign has to go through that kind of activity as regularly), Cancer can be considered moody. Changing. And, Cancer is the sign and behavior of mothering. Family is vital to the sign of Cancer. What the crab cares for, it goes *all in* on, sometimes to the point of smothering. Cancer is, an emotional fish, er, decapod. It’s fiercely protective of itself and of its own.
Those of us who know or love someone with strong or aspect-vexed Cancer energy instinctively seek to find stable land in those relationships, but sand shifts and moves. Even if Cancer trusts you the once, that was just that one time. The next time is its own experience: to be determined. You are in with a Cancer or you are out. And, at the same time that doesn’t mean you aren’t still caught in a pincer without even knowing… if a Cancer decides you are their family, that won’t waver. Even if you are continually tested. Cancer doesn’t let go unless it can see a good reason or something forces it.
The beauty of Cancer is the truth of the emotions. When Cancer isn’t bound by a calcifying rising or moon sign like Cap or making a hard aspect to something like Saturn (which would try to convince Cancer that overt emotion is a detriment), the pure emotional expression is generally gorgeous, or with a strong aspect to Mars sometimes scary, but usually at the least, remarkable, often an honor to witness.
So Cancer season has us all feeling what Sun, Moon, and Rising Cancers feel regularly, to some degree. Much like when the Sun is in Pisces and everyone is crying, others have to live here in this place of shift and armor and chronic awareness of underlying vulnerability, the rest of us only visit. All of this and I haven’t even addressed the Cancer new moon partial solar eclipse a few weeks ago – energy that will resonate and play out for months, especially for Cancer sun, rising, and moon folk.
Personally, that Cancer eclipse on the 12th was much stronger than I thought it would be, in ways I didn’t expect. So. Much. Cooking., and, during incredible heat outside… illogical, but satisfying. I go in cycles with cooking, but I suppose since Cancer is my 4th house of home, there’s nesting to be expected. And, extra focus on mothering of course. I went to see Won’t You Be My Neighbor with a friend, which severely cramped my crying. But still, I was and am wrecked, accessing those memories and emotions raised by it.
A thing I could see during the film was that while every viewer loves Mr. Rogers, his relationship to everyone varies, of course. As with the example in the film of Jeff Erlanger – someone to whom Mr Rogers probably meant the world – the rest of us fall along a spectrum. So confronting how much he meant to me, and why, (probably very similar to what he meant to my sister and brother) cuts to the quick, does not let up. We’ve been talking to each other about who has seen it, who hasn’t. It’s a sacred subject for us, something we each hold in our depths.
In this season it’s natural too that other, deepest, nerve-close narratives should arise now for emotional processing. Cancer is the season of the wounds that haunt us – the rusty, corroded aches we can’t quite name, asking to be pulled from the depths, cleansed, transformed. Things lost at sea rediscovered, brought up, and cataloged, understood, demystified.
A friend linked me to the CRIMINAL episodes about Evelyn Nesbit. And then Tuesday, Karina Longworth, posted the episode I’ve been so long dreading/waiting for: Virginia Rappe and Roscoe Arbuckle. I’m anxious thinking about listening to it, heart my throat. I’m so worried she is going to overlook or not expound upon a key angle.
I’ve studied these stories and women and women like them so much, and their narratives resonate so strongly, both scholastically and personally, especially Virginia’s. Sarah Marshall pressed me to explain it once and I couldn’t. I thought for sure she would have something she felt that way about, a topic she has to leave the room for should it arise, unable to hear so many get it so wrong and for it to be partly personal to her. But she didn’t.
I’m going to go see the Mr. Rogers movie again, alone. And properly, though characteristically silently, express everything that should be left there, in the dark, with only his constantly accepting face flickering back at me.
After Cancer season of course, is Leo. In Leo we can have genuine, well merited pride over what we worked through, use our new wisdom in a wonderful display of saturated individuality, or we can fall to pridefulness, having not worked through what arose, with a self-deceptive shrug of: ‘I’m fine the way I am. Humph’… all very, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In a few months, Scorpio will have something to say about that.
Current recurring visual themes of my season: keys, wasps, spiders, and the feathers are back. I asked for signs to keep me bolstered and steady, and so the feathers are back. And, people leaving things on my doorstep. Which is curious, and unsettling.
Ready yourselves for the next Full Moon partial Solar Eclipse in Aquarius on the 27th, and then one in August in Leo – a sort of next chapter in the book of last summer’s big eclipse in August. I like to think I’m sitting these eclipses these out, with little activity in these signs in my chart, but as I’ve learned, how these eclipses impact others ends up impacting how their relationships and communities change, grow, or morph in turn. The ripples made by others create whole tides elsewhere.
NOW WITH UPDATES BECAUSE HOLY SMOKES ELON MUSK STOP
In case anyone was doubtful, Elon Musk is a Cancer Sun (the sign the sun just left)… and that Sun is square Uranus… Tesla in more ways than one. Walking away from an issue around water (Cancer) and technology (Uranus) would be nearly impossible for him (Aries rising).
And also, because go internet… 😂 
———
You guys, occasionally problematic Elon Musk heard all of us!!! It’s one stressor to feel slightly less stressed about! PROGRESS. I guess when Thailand was like ‘Nah, Elon… keep your child submarine, we got this,’ the urge to do good was already poistioned in the chamber. (You hearing this, Bezos?)
And, if that isn’t sufficiently New Moon Solar Eclipse in Cancer for you, the Mr. Rogers movie is out of limited release. Sooo, now everyone can go weep openly in public with total strangers for two hours. Ah, Cancer season… never change.
I have thoughts about these 3 eclipses, but I got stung in the face yesterday and look like Ron Pearlman in Beauty and the Beast, so I’ll just do a round up of nice writings instead and then go ice my face.
Salient Writing from Jessica Lanyadoo
Gray Crawford – Partial Solar Eclipse in Cancer
July and August Eclipses – Julie Demboski
Solar Eclipse in Cancer – Chani Nicholas
Also I made this dank meme for yesterday, and I’m ridic proud of it. (I don’t actually speak as such… I’m the uncool equivalent of Poochie in The Simpsons.)
There are so many poems to post. So many that bite at the thrashing evil from separate ends… Warsan Shire, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, this…
1481hyperion 