The Rage Diaries by Heather Bartel

I. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS AN AVALANCHE

Take care to pay attention to what is frozen on the inside.

Take care to pay attention to when it is melting.

Let’s talk about the ice queen.

Let’s talk about growing up in the snow.

The girl grown to woman in a colder landscape, a landscape covered in white, in ice, the gray afternoon she was pulled in a pink sled down the hill, the sled her mother was pulling, the sled that flipped over, the shock of her bare face hitting the sharp cold of the snow. It was almost warm. It pricked. She prickled. She could picture her cheeks: rosy. And her mother stood laughing because her reaction to the shock of the cold must have been funny, her mother stood laughing as her poor face froze.

Picture the top bunk close to the sagging ceiling. Picture the apartment with no living room furniture, only a table in the corner and a bare carpeted floor. She used to sleep covered in quilts, no heat in the room, no heat anywhere in the house except from the fake fireplace, except the unbearable space heater in the bathroom, where even the hot water in the shower ran cold after only a couple of minutes and she would shiver, naked before the frosted window—what did she look like, was her face red, would she have been any warmer if she had crawled into the snow?

She didn’t know, so when she grew older, when she lived on her own, she did not want to pay for heat in the winter, stupidly letting her apartment get down to sixty, and then fifty, degrees. She never left the cabinet doors open—so what   if the pipes   could freeze? She slept in a cold bed upon a cold pillow, she wore a scarf and fingerless gloves and the thought of the cloth strangling her in her sleep didn’t scare her, only the thought of leaving the space heater on for too long, forgetting to turn it off after she closed her eyes, she was not afraid of turning to ice she was only afraid of not waking up   before   she   burned.

She watched the snow falling from her window.

She watched it cover the top of her car and the sidewalk and the street         watched

as it came down in pockets, filling like ashes

like the crescent-moons of her fingernails she was (is) always    scattering about.

And she put the water on to boil.

And she put on another blanket.

And she buried herself (she called it survival)           and she did not let go.

II. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS A TORNADO

is       it       only            because she spins?

When she’s dancing sometimes she closes her eyes and loses herself to the sound and the motion the feeling of her hair as it whips around her head, as it tickles her neck. Sometimes she is the only one when she is dancing, not dancing alone but dancing by herself, oblivious to those around her, the bodies in motion, the bodies responding to the sound, she is dancing within her own funnel of movement, the paths she creates across the floor chaotic and unpredictable, she forces everyone else to be aware of her, to get out of her way. Watch. It is possible she will close her eyes and spin with abandon and straight into you. Warning. She is moving, a certainty, she is coming.

I cannot sit still for too many minutes

(except for the days when I cannot move).

I cannot remember some mornings what it feels like to dance, cannot remember the movement of muscles cannot fathom the journey across the room when I become frozen when I am the stillness when I am preparing for the storm to come.

Does a woman move differently                                if she was a girl in the Midwest?

The rustle of tall grass and knowledge of a prairie, the familiarity with flatness, with heavy air that can turn at any moment, clouds that can go black and angry in an afternoon, the stillness that promises wreckage—these are the conditions under which she grew arms and legs and hair and teeth and tits and fingernails. Her heart began beating in a part of the world that wrestles the wind, and the wind decides when it’s time to come out to play, the wind moves on its own terms, the wind pulls the clouds into its rage and restlessness and need to move faster and larger and in a way that destroys and terrifies and reminds.

The wind wins.

And all is silent.

Except my mind.

Which keeps talking and talking though my body remains silent

(and still)

and I am no longer the tall grass I am no longer the flat earth, I am no longer the dancer, I am only the wind.   Waiting.   (I   am   only   the   wind.)

She spins, oh, she spins.

III. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS A WILDFIRE

The burning ember the spark that falls upon dry grass the smoke that rises and covers the earth and fills the sky and tears through the atmosphere. She is the flame that grows into another, into another until the forest has fallen beneath her the trees the ash she rubs across her forehead and between her breasts, this past, what was, nothing but remnants of fire, of that which has been burned, she puts the heat of it upon her tongue and lets it melt her throat. She is fire, she could breathe it if she would only exhale, she could take this fucking stretch of the landscape down she could end it. She will walk out the back door and slam it behind her. She will not bother to lock it. She will leave you inside, exposed and vulnerable, she will make you take care of yourself, her hands will freeze in the cold but she will warm them with matches will warm them with breath, the flames of all that could have been words if she hadn’t melted them into dust, she will leave you standing in a pool of gasoline and she won’t flinch she will never look back.

She’ll want to kiss a stranger to remember how it feels.

She could open her legs she could let them open, she could open them to let someone (come) inside.

She could be coming and she could be going she is going to rip holes in her tights she is going to shred them apart she is going to (come) she is going to lose her mind.

To remember how it feels.

And what, then, when she bursts into flames?          

What then?

Just like the ashes from a cigarette   she   will   fall   down.

IV. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS AN EARTHQUAKE

The plates are shifting. They are reaching toward one another beneath the ground. They are reaching, commingling, yearning; or they are pushing against, pushing into, slamming into, hitting, wanting to hurt.

And, oh, the things we do to each other when what we are wanting to do is           hurt.

Plates thrown against walls shatter, they crack when they fall to the floor, when they slip from the table when they are pushed from it, the yellow plate her grandmother gave her when she moved into her first apartment, the yellow plate that she dropped with a slice of pizza on it, that she sent off the table as she crashed into another room, as she stormed into the darkness to where she couldn’t see, where she could not be seen, where she did not want to see anything and did not see the yellow plate she had loved as it was thrown into the trash, did not see the contents of the wineglass she had filled as they were poured down into the sink, she was in the darkness on the hardwood floor on the house’s foundation on the dirt on the dirt on the dirt burying somewhere deep below it those plates.

Smashing.

Look at them: pressing into   each  other           hard.

Let’s talk about what it is we are wanting to do when all we are wanting to do is hurt. It hurts when the earth breaks in half, hurts when the gap is a threat of what anyone could fall into, a gap going down into what is unfathomable, down into the fires, the furnace that heats us my god it is so warm it is so goddamned hot it is sweltering and she is melting, look, she is melting: into the floor her wineglass is empty and she doesn’t know it yet and the sky is dark so she doesn’t see it she is only attached to the floor (to the foundation to the ground, down   down   down) and is not thinking of what would happen if it                  split.

Consider the plates as they press against each other, doing what they wish they could be doing, which, of course, is fucking. The plates have arms, don’t they? The plates have lips and teeth and some have cunts and some have cocks and they get wet sometimes, they get hard, they want to reach for each other, for these most seductive parts. Whatever they are reaching for, the point is they are reaching, extending, bumping, vibrating, overlapping

(they only want to love)

(they only want to fuck)

they only want to fucking love

these plates, these plates they are crashing, cracking                   and into the earth we all fall.

V. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS A TIDAL WAVE

Just beyond some stillness there is the threat of sudden overflowing, water coming not as a relief but a roaring, an outpouring into a crash, a flood, the gradual (re)filling of every part.

The tide like the moon, like a woman, on a cycle—periodically she rises and she falls. The body of a woman a vessel; the body of the ocean an undulation; the shape a body of water curls into, roars into, breaks from; rising too high in a sudden onset of feeling, rising so high she must come crashing down, in a rush, this release her goodbye.

Goodbye to the houses goodbye to the trees goodbye to those left standing goodbye to the past and the roots and the dirt. She will fill all as she crashes, the holes and the alleys, and then she will fill some more, fill what is not meant to contain so much water, or any water, no more than a spill, no more than a puddle, because her body is swelling, she is dripping water from her pores it is falling from her fingertips it is soaking her hair, she is wet overflowing, she is roaring she is spilling she is careening toward the vessel, take it, take it all, all she can no longer hold. And the spaces she seeps into, the ground she soaks, the sky she mirrors—in vastness, in inescapability—the sky that she mirrors is holding its breath.

Heather Bartel is founder and co-editor of the literary journal and community, The Champagne Room. Her essay collection, Exit the Body, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press in 2024. Her work can be found in MAYDAY, Fence, Heavy Feather Review, Grimoire, Miracle Monocle, Leavings, Birdcoat Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbia, MO.

Two Essays by Candice M. Kelsey

PRICK

I found a place that will do it, Manhattan Beach Nails on Artesia.

We drive our son in South Bay traffic, a four-wheeled needle passing like thread through two-lane fabric. He’s thirteen and wearing a thousand microscopic glochid spines—fine hair-like spikes embedded in his arms. One of Westport Heights’ shirtless skaters, the youngest disciple of the Westchester Skatepark’s stair-sets and hubbas, Mikey lost sight of the prickly pear cactus by our front curb and found himself in its arms.

Nature’s acupuncture, my husband tries to lighten the mood.

The women at the shop will know how to wax them out, I reassure him. The concept of hot wax being torn from his body intrigues his inner thrill seeker, and he quiets while repositioning in the rear seat of our Kia. I turn and mime a kiss to his forehead. My husband navigates the road with speed and skill like the night our son was born, the sunset Sig-alert on the 405 Freeway as we willed ourselves to Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

It’s a boy, the nurse announced, offering my husband the honor of cutting the cord. Two clamps and a swath of gauze awaited his grip on the sterile scissors, but he refused, shaking his head without speaking. The nurse cut the cord. My husband bristled like she had removed his foreskin, or like he was forced to read a pamphlet on vasectomies. It will be okay, dad, the nurse reassured.

Scissored, and just like that something existential, even holy had happened to us—my body, my son—we were separated for the first time. He now took oxygen from the world instead of me. Moments later, I birthed the deflated disc of dying tissue and watched its lifeless tail wag in umbilical triumph. Dr. B. held it up, ran a rubbered finger inside the wet membrane like a dentist examining gums. Such a fine line between intimate and clinical.

Someone got dad a cup of water. I get my baby.

The weight of the bundle, the first kiss on his head before my husband accompanied him to the scale. Wrapped in blue and topped with his first beanie, my son left the breast, entered life’s symphony of leaving.

The women at MB Nails place my son in an elevated massage chair, the only boy in the salon, the only shirtless client. Perched on the edge of his seat, feet straddling the pedicure basin, avoiding eye contact, he appears helpless, uncomfortable among walls of glossy cosmetic posters, kaleidoscope shelves rainbowed with polish, women whose toes are woven with paper towels, spread unnatural and open. I see his father in him, want my son to skate above the separation of men and women—past the sharpness between what women find beautiful, transcendent, but men view as hideous, repulsive.

His father waits in the car until we emerge successful, my son throwing a thumb up in one hand and waving the wax removal tape in his other, needles now fossilized in pale green like memory. Like a badge of masculinity. Theseus with the head of a Gorgon. His aesthetician waves her purple-gloved hand, laughing.

Dr. B. laughed, his warm hand on my stirruped thigh, I’ve made you a virgin again. Stirrup is a funny word, one that conjures a sense of power, a hot-breathed steed controlled by a rhythmic kick. Stirrup also rhymes with kick flip, the trick my son was attempting when he landed in the cactus. But I was not some lady in a legend riding from responsibility, alone on the moors, hair pirouetting in North Sea mist. I was prostrate on a table under medical-grade lighting with an oversized mirror trained between my legs.

I’ve made you a virgin again. As if that prick were God and had just rewound two thousand years of Eve. Without my consent, he had stitched my vagina extra tight. Because he could. Couldn’t you just make me a good mom, I want to ask him now.

Those were the days when obstetricians considered episiotomies necessary. The days when male doctors could say whatever the hell they wanted to female patients, women whose bodies were fatigued, numbed from the waist down, riddled with IVs. Stone-eyed mothers whose legs trembled from hours of being forced open by cold metal and latexed hands. Women whose husbands refused to watch the miracle of life emerge from the geography they desire to enter. Women who nonetheless know birthing a child is an act of power, even resistance, the stirrups a symbol of control, the labor a Pegasus freshly dappled with the Gorgon’s blood.

It’s called the husband stitch, Dr. B. laughed again as he cut the thread. A man’s pleasure is always at the forefront. Like the introduction to one of those popular guides for new mothers, the irreverent edition, when the author describes giving her husband oral sex in their hospital room moments before being wheeled into delivery. Or like how the word Gorgon auto-corrects to virgin, a word that confounds me, a word that has shamed women for centuries and empowered men as champions for stealing it. Like that.

Like that send-off as I began learning how to raise a boy. Teach him to be comfortable in his skin, watch out for life’s glochid spikes, and not become a prick.

After Dr. B.’s hands had passed the needle through, repairing my two-lane flesh, it fell to the floor, spun in a splash of my—of all women’s, even Eve’s, Medusa’s—blood before quieting. As if in shock that this is how it goes.

Leaving the nail shop, I wave my husband out of the driver's seat. I drive now. Mikey tumbles into the front of the Kia a little more confident and a lot smoother. The traffic has cleared. The marine layer is setting in—softening the sharpness of the city.

MEDITATION WHERE MALE INTRUSION MEETS FEMALE EMBODIMENT

The neck is a tender destination on the map of our bodies, a geographical vulnerability, like a floodplain or low-lying coast. The collar bone a sigmoid set of wings.

The other night I read about the collared flycatcher, how the males are evolving to be less ornamented in response to rising temperatures. The large white forehead patch that once secured a robust mating schedule has declined in size, says climate change ecologists. I read a flycatcher poem once, which I subsequently shared with my twelfth grade women’s literature students. It was Claire Wahmanholm’s “O.” As they were journaling, I told them to consider her reliance on sonic play—rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance: From ornateness came the ornate flycatcher and ornate / fruit dove. From oil, the oilbird.

Funny epithet for a bird, collared. A wingbeat of a word.

It’s a term TV detectives use. Stemming from the 17th Century, meaning to grab someone by the neck. Not just someone, the perp who has been caught, yoked finally, and no longer able to harm society. In police procedural fashion, metonymy apprehends its meaning. Not unlike kill, collar is noun, verb, adjective, and adverb. A sort of feline word, its hard c a voiceless velar stop followed by a lax mid-back rounded o, double alveolar lateral ll, and murmur diphthong ar. It stretches and purrs, a two-syllable pounce.

2018 saw the posthumous publication of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—outpacing the cops in tracking Joseph “Golden State Killer” DeAngelo, McNamara died in the process of writing. How strange death’s timing, its pounce hard, voiceless, and rounded. Dead in her sleep at forty-six, a life startlingly incomplete. The manuscript like its author’s life was only two-thirds finished. HarperCollins and her husband brought it to light, and two months after McNamara’s magnum opus released, detectives finally caught DeAngelo. Handcuffed at his Sacramento home with a boat in the driveway and a roast in the oven. Collared like the Elizabethan nobility in their late Tudor ruffs. He was responsible for thirteen murders and fifty-one rapes across California. The country watched as news of his capture spread. Watching has become the rhyme and meter of our lives.

Last summer, like most Americans I watched the January 6 Special Committee hearings and was tickled by a resurgence of the word clavicle. As in, he reached for his clavicle in the Secret Service SUV because he was the effing president. Cassidy Hutchinson wore a fitted white blazer with classic notch lapel. Ornate and robust, she was a black-and-white Shrike flycatcher perched in the silence of an important room. She testified.

DeAngelo’s victims—Charlene Smith, Cheri Domingo, and many others—would never get to testify. He restrained, raped, and murdered them in the middle of the night. A former police officer, he used a blinding flash of light to the face. Asleep one moment, in the spotlight the next, as jarring a change in climate as I could imagine. The scenario unwings me, the sudden white patch on their foreheads, the sound of sheets plucked like feathers.

I sleep with a knife under my pillow now, bone-handled, small as the basal joint of a bird’s wing. The hardness beneath the plush and push of foam, parallel to my collarbone like a cat’s buried kill. I grip it. I fool myself into believing I’m ready.

Lately I also find myself researching women’s 70s and 80s fashion. An attempt to connect with DeAngelo’s victims perhaps or maybe a distraction to refocus my fear. 70s collars were nearly twice the size of today’s; large, floppy, and pointy was the look. The 80s saw more bows or ties at the neck. As if even then we were preparing to defend ourselves.

I pay more attention to how I dress now that I teach English at an Orthodox Jewish girls’ school. Tznios requires I wear a skirt, cover my knees, elbows, even my clavicle. I find a glimmer of freedom in this new dress code and embrace the mandated modesty less from novelty and more from a reverence for centuries of tradition. If simply avoiding a V-neck permits my temporary membership in this sacred community, who am I to take issue? The Hebrew tickles my tongue as I remind my students to button up while they kiss the mezuzah at the door to our classroom. I cannot help a tenderness in these moments. Lord protect this flock of dark-skirted fledglings. They entertain my attempts at offering up poems like Wahmanholm’s but openly prioritize their more sensible coursework, like AP Biology. How we tend to sort and sequence our lives in order to survive what is required of us.

The collared flycatcher was one of the first birds to have its full genome sequenced. An ornithological profiling to help geneticists understand things like pluming reflectance and hatching success. The undeniable breadcrumbs of DNA, like how the police finally collared the Golden State Killer.

Yesterday my cat left his kill by our front bench, under the desert globemallow. It’s not a collared flycatcher—I’ve learned they don’t live in California. This poor dead thing could be a Pacific-slope or buff-breasted flycatcher according to the Audubon bird app. No matter. Its neck had been snapped in the quiet of pre-dawn Los Angeles, where death lingers, an eye on all low-lying coasts of tender destination. Caught in the spine of our cholla cactus, the cat’s collar catches my eye.

CANDICE M. KELSEY [she/her] is a poet, educator, and activist living bicoastally in L.A. and Georgia. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2022, she is the author of six books. Candice also serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/

Self-Possession by Stina French

My sister had Prince’s Purple Rain album. I stole it, right around puberty. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t choose any other soundtrack to my coming of age. 

“Let’s Go Crazy” congregates with an organ that fades into a bopping drum beat. Then we get that masterful two-stroke electric guitar, followed by bright pops of synth. An anthem against going gently into that good night. He calls for us to “please, come” over and over at the end, before he strums the guitar to an elongated fever pitch, scrambling the way I flicked my clit in marathon masturbation sessions, when I’d see how many times I could cum and lost count. 

“Take Me With You” talked about being turned on and getting out of there together. Appolonia Kotero threw her voice up above his, just a bit higher, riding it. “The Beautiful Ones” was so beautiful it almost hurt to listen, starting with that sparse knocking rhythm he got from using an LM-1 drum computer. It’s a snare, but with the tip held on the head, slapped against the rim, tuned an octave or so down to the just-right sound. Prince’s voice ranges up and down from falsetto pleading to a guttural, screamo declaration of desire. But what really got me, by far, was the talking at the front of “Computer Blue.” “Wendy,” “Yes, Lisa?” “Is the water warm enough?” “Yes, Lisa.” “Shall we begin?” “Yes, Lisa.” I didn’t know what they were getting into, but I wanted in, too. That teasing, sparseness under them before the synth gets fingered, up-down, up-down, and the guitar climbs and shreds. For the finale song on side A, “Darling Nikki,” I’d flirt with the door jamb, eventually dancing with it, as if each side were a different man, both of whom were enthralled by me. I’d kiss my hand laid against it, teasing, then arch backward, run my tongue down the wood on the other side, upside down, and kiss the brass of the lock. I’d walk away when he says, “Come back, Nikki, come back,” and crouch on my knees on the floor, arch all the way backwards, swinging frenzied. Knees spread, legs still under me, I’d lay back between them, sweaty and satiated in the way I never was from my early experiments with sex. 

There’s this echo after the main event, like riding a cum until it’s good and gone. Some kind of weirdo afterglow, where he seems to be catching his breath. Other voices join his, voices backmasked. Reversed, they are saying, “The Lord is coming soon. Coming, coming soon.” I didn’t know that at the time, but the irreverence came through clear. And in a house where I was screamed at for saying the word “masturbate,” I needed Prince’s affirmation of Nikki’s shameless sexuality.

I’d take my mother’s green-handled vanity mirror into my room, its slender handle rising elegantly into a diamond-esque shape, like a corseted woman, waist up. I would turn on the Prince album, and get naked. I’d squat over the mirror, spreading, peering, leering. I was especially fascinated by my clit. How erect and huge it got. I’d get turned on immediately and have to touch myself. I can’t remember my first girl kiss, since it happened so early. I wish I could forget my first boy kiss, with his gaping fish mouth and inarticulate tongue. But my pussy mouth kissing itself in that mirror, I’ll always remember fondly. I gave myself a sloppy wet one, alright, meeting in the middle: sticky cum strings pulling away from themselves between my quadrupled cunt lips, the real and the reflected. Later, I learned what a sheela-na-gig was, but I didn’t put it together that I’d been engaged in the same posture back then, advertising my fecundity, maybe because I was only advertising it to myself. 

We had family photos on the walls of my childhood home, but I don’t remember ever being happy like we looked in them. They were from when the stepfather and the mother first married. A couple done maybe at JC Penney’s. All images can lie. It's just a matter of distance from the lens and who's holding it. The same men who sneer at selfies will watch underage Daddy porn.

When I was crouched over that mirror, getting high on Prince and self-possession, as close to myself as I could get, I was engaged in an act more radical than I could have understood at the time. But my body grew wet with what it understood. If we fuck ourselves to know ourselves, we should all fuck ourselves more.

---

Stina French is a professor/performer who writes erotic mystery, magic-realist memoir, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Manifest Station and Heavy Feather Review, among others. She wears welts from the Bible Belt and hosts "listen to your skin,” an erotic reading series. Find her on IG at sister_rainbow_scream. Find her monthly event at https://www.facebook.com/ListenToYourSkinEroticReadingSeries.

Houses We Die In by Morghen Tidd

main street:

i used to be able to see this apartment from my bedroom window. places we both left. you my best friend watching me walk home from your kitchen. me a body disappearing into the mystery of the night. an icy skate back home. i associate your apartment with winter even though we spent many summer nights there together. something about the memory of heat the warmth hitting my face at the door. i think of how proud i sound when i tell people the tale of us discovering we were almost neighbors when i drove you home one night. my voice a thing taking credit as if i devised the layout of the town as if somehow i created this situation and not some type of sweet luck.

your apartment a brick building overlooking an ice cream shop that never had a chance in this world. your apartment up the weird stairs to the second story. i made a game of knocking and then hiding or standing in strange stances each time i would arrive. something that’s become hard to recreate in your new space though i try. i think of the candles lit and mixing together to cook a smell that is indescribable to me but that i can still imagine if i close my eyes. something welcoming and warm. something i have never found in another space. always in the morning putting my nose against my shirt that i wore to your house and finding that scent tucked away within the threads.

your apartment open the door into the kitchen tiled floors and a double card table where we would play king’s cup. and once we laid out food there for a friendsgiving that your then fiancé invited a hot stranger to where we played jackbox games and the night became something familiar as if we had always all known each other. and once before a spring semester opened up i drunkenly kicked your stove so hard the next day discovering my sock a bloody mess and my toe nail broken in half. and once you planned a birthday party for me here where people dressed like gnomes and drank and filled out little papers mismatching compliments and roasts. and once we welcomed the new year sitting on your kitchen floor spitting champagne back and forth in each other’s mouths like a never-ending fountain of affection. i can still feel the bubbles moving through the gaps in my teeth.

i never fell asleep in this space though the plans for a slumber party were always in the works. off and on i would let myself in with the borrowed key to take care of your cat and bring in the mail. some days i would do so in a hurry a quick in and out. other times i would take my shoes off and stay thinking of the ghosts you describe being here in your stories. playing little tricks like maybe i’m one of these ghosts. putting my hand on the wall like i could just sink in there and remain. sometimes i would steal a beer from your fridge cracking it open while sprawling on your couch with all of the lights on in the place. sometimes i would bring my own book to read on your oversized chair and other times i would search through your books running my nosy fingers across their spines searching for something that wasn’t mine.

my ghost here is tucked into the cushions on the left hand side of the plaid couch. my ghost here curling up in the little spot in your closet where your cat would hide. my eyes wide reflecting light like hers. my ghost here pacing over the sticky spot in the kitchen where the champagne dripped from our mouths. my ghost here knocking on the door and waiting crouched on the staircase for the new occupants to find.

❧

edinburg road:

my childhood home a small one-story ranch set back and surrounded by woods from behind and to either side. on a road that is also a town. isolation easy here except the house is packed full. three bedrooms with seven occupants. at one time or another each of the bedrooms was one i called my own.

open the front door mind the gap between the steps and the storm door peppered with old bullet holes. the previous occupant someone who sold drugs we were told and i try to imagine a person driving all the way out here for drugs. the middle of nowhere. my childhood nowhere. enter into the living room small and carpeted with a weird bar cutout behind the couch the room never quite separate from the kitchen. the kitchen always ugly tiled floor a ‘70s yellow with a matching stove. the hallway small with a vent in the middle always ready to stub a toe the hallway branching off into the three rooms and little bathroom.

my childhood home a place i always wanted to leave. always too small too aware of how others thought of us my family all crushed together in it. the town where we were always outsiders always someone outside of something. i remember someone at a soccer game asking my mom how we all fit in such a space. i remember always yearning for the other houses i got to visit houses with unending bedrooms and stairs that separate one part from another. i remember feeling stuck so far away from anything that mattered or seemed to matter. i look back at photos of me when i was young in that house. photos with the christmas tree squeezed into the spare space between the ugly floral couch and the wall. photos on the swirly aged kitchen floor with the table my parents still use in the background. photos of us all outside playing in the woods or on the front lawn. i never considered how lucky it was to be able to step outside and go into the woods something i cannot do now in my own apartment.

the bedrooms here a constant reshuffling of occupants. me and my four siblings a brother three sisters. me the second oldest. my first room the smallest one partitioned off from the living room i am told when my parents moved in. i don’t remember much of this room being my own only what i see in the photos with the pink wallpaper trim and my pooh bear chair. there are so many things i stopped letting myself remember about being a child too many things for my mind to hold that didn’t seem important and now they are gone. i remember wooden bunkbeds that i shared with one of my sisters. the top bunk mine with the barbie comforter that i would have nightmares of a yellow anaconda hidden inside after seeing one on tv. i remember my brother having the smallest room to himself after i moved into one with my sister. i remember the youngest two the twins always sharing a room double of everything. i remember getting the room to myself when my brother moved to my grandparents’ and one of my sisters took over his old room. my room then painted lime green with posters cut out of magazines all the celebrity crushes anthony green elijah wood emma watson staring down among others and eye-catching parrots clipped from old issues of bird talk splattered around the room. i don’t remember the reason but then i moved into the biggest room switching with the twins. the room with the white walls and dark blue carpeting. my bed a mattress on a boxspring. and my parents always sleeping in the living room. one on the recliner and the other on the couch.

open the basement door tucked away at the end of the kitchen. the trashcan sitting to the left the lightswitch on the right. the stairs old with paint chipping and the thin handrail i would clutch to as i let my feet down. the cold cement floor feeling nice on the feet in the summer’s humidity. my father would trap beavers muskrats otters and mink slicing their skin off their little bodies me and my brother watching then stretching their furs on metal racks to hang down here. he sold the furs for extra money that we needed. the stench of death like something haunted always lingered here long after my father stopped trapping. the stench something i can still smell now years and years later. i can still picture the knife peeling the fur from flesh the fur pulled back like a glove.

some days when my heart wants to go home i picture myself sitting on the cement front steps fingers running through the fur of my childhood dog staring into the cemetery across the street. some days i picture myself sitting on the cold basement stairs watching my mother do laundry. some days i picture myself sitting with my brother in the tree across the street sap sticky on our hands as we suppress giggles watching the neighbor.

my ghost here is beneath the front steps with the garter snakes and spotted frogs waiting to grab at the new occupants’ feet. my ghost here in the second story of the garage my father and his father built by hand. my ghost here at the end of the hallway crouched cramped in the old green laundry basket i would sit in as a kid. my ghost here hanging in the basement from the bloodstained metal racks like an animal waiting for someone to find.

❧

jameson street:

i drive by this house usually once a day not on purpose just a part of my stretch. an ugly ugly house with the front door ripped off once in a windstorm the white chipping paint visible from behind the wheel. the house that once caught on fire before you my poet friend lived there the house with raccoons in the roof and trees bending to their knees the house filled with the stench of the neighboring paper mill something constant something rotting. now i see children’s toys on the front yard and it feels wrong knowing all that happened in that space. no place for children a place of it’s always 4:30 in the morning a place of spewing poetry in the cracks of dawn a place of something late.

the little front step we made into a porch-like thing. rounded up by roommates from the bars where we promised each other just one drink. i did not live here but at times i felt as if. us sitting on the step smoking cigarettes deviating from our regularity some fucked up kids getting a little too old to act like kids. here i am the kerouac to your cassady you joke once because i can’t drive worth shit and you wouldn’t stop for the devil himself. here we are something volatile something wicked. here my worst self brought out your own. here i learn the shifting boundaries of friendships how blurry these terms get how desire works itself into everything near me. here my bandana tied into my hair you kissing my cheek we both clutching ipas that are no longer sold.

open the side door always unlocked always riddled with spiders and step into the kitchen. nights here spent sitting on the tiled floor nights here spent mixing gin and tonics squishing lime slices into mason jars nights here spent having just one more. the little sideboard that mail piled itself up on while we all were leaning. the stacks of books littered around hands grabbing mouths sharing lines aloud. sapphic lines slipping out mingling with the words of contemporary and even sometimes our own. living as we heard writers did in our little classes into the night mixing slipping and something else. things like this can’t last forever and didn’t. it was a happy place and then it wasn’t. i don’t remember when it changed only that it did. it was and then it wasn’t.

move into the dining room with more bookshelves with a little table and the rotation of chairs that were always breaking. in the living room with the bay window and oversize chair that i slept on more than once. the photo of me hungover plaid skirt cropped hair passed out with my thumb in my mouth on that chair. the photo of me blunt bobbed sitting up straight on that chair lipsticked mouth eyes something unkind. maybe it was in that moment that this space changed. us watching tv in the darkened room the curtains pulled tight after a night of me longing for someone who turned away. you always convincing me that no one else deserved me. only you. the blue futon where i sent drunk texts to the object of my desire after he left after he read my then favorite poem to me then left where i fell asleep crying and woke up cuddled into your dog the house empty. the blue futon that moved into my apartment when things were changing the same futon still lives with me now.

round the corner passing the slippery carpeted stairs that i fell down in the early awakenings of new years day my back a rug burn my leg kicking out one of the wooden banisters. into the bathroom my favorite room in the house so ugly ugly. the vintage pepto bismol pink tiles on the wall with white filling keeping them together. the double doors one always locked leading into your once bedroom the strange setup never actual privacy. the little window in the shower peeking into your neighbor’s backyard with no curtain. once i let myself into the house running past your roommates and puked into the toilet. looking up from the heaving surrounded by the warm pink glow.

my ghost here is in your bed wrapped up and hogging the blankets the morning waking into afternoon. my ghost here kneeling in front of the toilet head tilted up held tight and mesmerized by that pink glow. my ghost here sinking into the shelves of books searching for all the lines you read to me. my ghost here on that overstuffed chair pretending to be asleep and trying to riddle out all that went wrong.

❧

shirley street:

my first apartment a little corner one-bedroom in a building of twelve units. a building that used to be a canoe or creamery factory the sign for their parking knocked to the side in the lot. twelve mailboxes lined up on the breaking porch with the little bench seat where my partner and i sipped from drinks the view just the back of the town post office. when i moved in here this little space for one i was alone.

open the front door and take the stained carpeted stairs up and up to the second story. with a sharp turn to the left pass the door with the brightly colored alphabet magnets spelling out yes sir and walk to the one with a little gnome outside the door. number eight. behind the double lock deadbolt always engaged is a living room not separated from the kitchen. a little metal line splitting the two visually keeping the carpet safe from the yellowing tiles. in the kitchen a large wooden beam runs through the middle the hand-me-down table leaning one side against it. there are no hallways in this space the bedroom and bathroom both branching from the kitchen. the bathroom with no windows always a stale smell something wet and hidden in the uneven flooring. the cold water knob never working the hot water one dripping keeping time continuous like the ticking clock.

the single bedroom with my favorite window opening to show the waterfront in a distance. look to the left there’s the fire and police station the screaming sirens something i learn to sleep through even when apartments next door burn down twice. my phone filling with missed calls people awake worrying about my own building while i deep in slumber the world tuned out. look to the right at an angle and the kitchen window of my best friend nights spent peeking out seeing if the light was on longing to feel less alone. this space built for loneliness this space built for me learning to live with myself. no roommates no talking with the other occupants really except for the glimpse of a year when a neighbor’s cat would roam the halls and parking lot. the little cat who i loved like my own and who died outside of my apartment. hit by a car flying down the wrong way. twelve units and all of them something outside of myself. there were glances made into these lives though over the three years i spent in this space. i could hear the family next door screaming and fighting sometimes late at night and i would press my ear against the wall trying to understand what was happening. down the hall the blonde woman who worked at a coffee shop who would exchange familiar glances with me as i paid for my drink but never spoke. i came home to the police outside her door talking to a man and then the next month she was gone. i shared wifi with the neighbor who replaced the fighting family her dog always staring in the window to the parking lot we did not speak really just a routine of me shoving the envelope payments through the gap under her door. 

so many things in this apartment my little first apartment were given to me. that old blue futon that lived a life of parties and spilt drinks now pushed against the living room wall getting covered with a coat of thick dust and blankets my great-grandmother crocheted. the chipped black table with wobbly legs that my sister’s ex-boyfriend helped carry down the narrow and twisting staircase of a loose acquaintance who was moving away. two of the four chairs never used because i never had more than one person over. the spoons with silver and black checkering handles that i took from my parents’ house that were with us since my childhood that i still feel sentimental when plopping them down into bowls of soup. mountains of tupperware borrowed and never returned. the baby blue countertop giving space for the microwave my partner’s aunt gave to me. the fan pushed into the living room window a temporary gift from a friend i no longer talk to. my little apartment filled to the brim with others not a lot of space for my own.

when i picture my bedroom now my mind often still conjures this space i left years ago. my bedroom that was mine and mine alone. the overstuffed queen bed on a boxspring pushed imperfectly against the wall. the gap between the wall and the bedside a place i filled with half-read books with hair elastics with forgotten condom wrappers with chewed nails. the windowsills white painted and round stains from wine dripping over the rim the windowsills holding succulents and other flowers i treated myself to on occasion. a large closet filled to the brim i would always peek behind double accordion doors in fear of finding someone strange before going to sleep. the solar nightlight always plugged in by the door the room never completely unseen. my bookshelves overflowing with a record player on one the first birthday gift from my partner that we would use late into the nights dazed watching the record spin itself while conservations whirled through the air.

my ghost here is sleeping in that gap between the wall and my bed laying on top of the things forgotten. my ghost here ear pushed against the shared wall trying to make unstrange the forever rotating people on the other side. my ghost here peering out the bedroom window waiting for the light in my friend’s house to be flicked on. my ghost here on the porch petting the ghost cat of my neighbor us together sitting forever in our final goodbye.

❧

cedar street:

i have to use google maps to find the name of this street in my mind i can picture it but could not remember for the life of us what it was called. and i can’t just ask you my friend who ghosted me though i keyword search through our old conversations to find it without any luck. the street tucked behind the bars of the town bars that we only ever went together once. you not drinking and me not wanting to be around you when i do. we had fun here once though now it is difficult for me to remember those times to parse through all that happened after you left here and then to parse through all that happened after that.

i park my car off the driveway in a little spot with dying grass beside a tree. walk through the garage door the mudroom that leads to an old couple’s home your apartment nestled above their garage in an in-law suite. sometimes i run into the old couple while i wait for you to unlock your door they never remembering my name right and me never correcting them. they always nice enough but you never really liking them something always wrong the way they live in their house the way they creep through the floors creaking and opening doors. i agree with you then but now wonder if it was just the forever searching of yours for something to complain about someone to plant your grievances in.

walk up the stairs with a little twist not straight up i cannot remember if they are wooden or carpeted but i try to remember. a tiny entryway with the forbidden door always locked that led to one of the couple’s spare rooms you always wanting to look in to it to use it but it never being yours. go into the kitchen with the sink that caught all the water never draining how it should spluttering and coughing the rice water strained into it. so many nights here eating baked beans microwave and jasmine rice on the stove. i still associate the fragrant smell of jasmine rice with you i rarely eat it anymore. in a cupboard you kept little straws for me to use beside a box of charleston chews my old favorite candy and some type of soda in the fridge. this space loved me once you made space for me here. i had my spot on the couch. i had the place i would leave my shoes. i had my place to park. there was a space for me here and then not. how to move myself out.

the living room cramped with random decorations on the wall motivational stickers from dollar stores put up in the wrong order little monsters scattered around to find. a coffee table riddled with sour patch kids half eaten forgotten art projects. your spooky dolls bookends on the shelf squeezed into corner. your cat my great-grandmother’s once cat lazing in the window sun. we would sit on your couch for hours chatting about anything at all or watching b-list horror movies and raunchy animes late into the night. we would play games while joking each other into tears and loss of breath. a space for talks of art and books and all that is happening in our classes. a space where i felt at ease once felt like i had found someone twisted into my own being. it felt easy being here with you.

the bathroom i can’t remember just that it was small. the bedroom i can’t remember other than the window ladder shoved to the side in case there ever was a fire. there are so many gaps here for me trying to trace where my feet landed all the things we talked about the nights turning into early mornings. haunted by these gaps wondering if this space was all that i made it up to be or if the time we shared was just projections of wishful thinking making you into a thing i needed into someone who wanted to be near me. i cannot remember maybe don’t let myself remember maybe don’t want to remember.

my ghost here is stuck outside the garage door looking up to the window in your living room waiting to be noticed. my ghost here is pulling at the door knob shaking it in desperation but could just be the wind. my ghost here circling the house searching for a new way in but everything is sealed. my ghost here curled up outside of the door waiting for you to come home and remember me.

---

Morghen Tidd (she/her) is a writer from Maine who received her MA in English from the University of Maine. Her writing has been published in Heavy Feather Review, Overheard Magazine, Squawk Back, Unfortunately Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Her debut short story collection, girl thing, is forthcoming from Long Day Press in 2023. Morghen can be found on Twitter and Instagram: @spookymorghen

Uncanny Valley Girl: Legibility and the Archetype of the Witch in My Expressions of Non-Binaryness

A Hybrid Poetry Series & Talk Originally Presented at the 2022 Visiting the Shadows Conference in Prague, Czechia

Exquisite Corpse at the Funeral, Taking Her Heels Off in the Grass, Blotting Her Mascara with a Xeroxed Copy of Psalm 23, Makes the Eulogy about the Survived By because Isn’t That the Point of Grief?

I plead guilty to ending all my poems
directing the audience to the nearest
light source, but we have to start elsewhere:
memory-eating black mold on door frames

Gramma couldn’t reach, Grampa’s mountain home
near the woodpeckers, then his home in memory care
where his Dementia invented tigers & hear
my Dad shooting at turtle doves, asking how come

Grampa insists on feeding the birds,
& now Grampa is gone & Dad fills each
feeder– wonder is contagious, poetic,

but memory is not, a redhead swear-worded
woodpecker belly laughs where I reach
the mountain peak, waxing prophetic.

Fold

I peaked in college & Mom hates my work clothes
but she loves Erin Brockovich, so sure, there is hope
as long as I expose a corporate scam & love a good man
who will never love my work, bride to whoever’s

Bic lighter & 9-24 months from now we’ll get Grampa’s ashes
& what hearth will hold his story & if nature is how
you say what is inherently part of us, then
every blue heron that finds me after every heartbreak

is my story. Winged nudge to tell Mom about the first girl I–
I know that Grampa knelt for each homily, & I know
his hands shaped church air, but that memory isn’t mine, 

it was my Mom telling me, so when I say end with lightness,
I mean slit the poem’s throat with slats of streetlights glowing
through the blinds, those pillars I circled the night he died.

Fold

They say Gramma & Grampa circled the floor at weddings,
dancing all night, & forever in our living room, jitterbugging,
& forever his pink zinfandel with ice & forever I litter
memories on the wall like spaghetti to see if I’m ready

to watch that video of me singing for Grampa, 8 years ebbing
into diagnosis, his eyes closed like prayer hands, his feathered
jawline he drew in that self-portrait, his birds of an etc.,
& they say God gives you what you can handle, forgetting

that Gramma never wanted to marry, fools, she’d say, until
4 months in, honeymoon baby, sympathetic pregnancy,
& a wedding table teeming with Italian wedding cookies,

& that camera flash on their faces, hands thrilled
together smiling at future audiences, cake-slicing
& wonder isn’t narratively convenient, but he forgot anyways.

Fold

Once upon a time I was nineteen & growing out my hair,
Once upon a time, I was always just off my bicycle, body
odor, kazooing grass in the plum of my
thumbs. You sat with me in hospital beds, your

hand orbiting my ring finger,
& Grampa & I fishing in that memory
does not include me fishing or any
visual of Grampa, only the spector

of going, the Ford’s crank windows in my
hands, & it was 5 AM when I finally left the
home you & I made together, narrating

my steps to keep the story moving,
& I am going & I hope I carry pieces of him with me,
& I am going & I hope I carry pieces of him with me.

Fold

The second heron reminded me I was dumped in a cemetery,
& the first came in the way of long legs & considering how
my light is sent, I am ready to believe in God again, because
God is apparently a part of me, each heron dancing,

& the last time I saw him at memory
care, my brother patting his back softly, Gramma
crying & giving him Christmas gifts, Gramma
crying & kissing him on the cheek, I was thinking

of Grampa before all this, two feet on the pedal, Grampa
whose beard I scratched my face on, jumping
into his arms when I was little & the way his eyes would draw

in light when he said hey gal, & the animal I saw
in the woods the day after he died, & the animal nodding
back at me, how Grampa was there for me when he was already gone.

Fold

Gramma already gives me necklaces & to science, her body,
& Gramma sewed dish sponges until she washed off
her fingerprints & there are so many things I want
to ask that shapeless kindness that drove me to go fishing

but all I remember is the way the wind felt, the feeling
of being looked after & 9-24 months from now, we’ll send off
Grampa’s ashes in a Folgers can & we will all cough
in the dust of different, true men & what if “mummify”

didn’t mean embalm, but instead meant surround with mums,
& I don’t know if he lifted me on his shoulders to fill a
bird feeder or if I am remembering a toddler’s desire to be lifted,

& there are so many ways to tell his story & each is a true one,
his breadcrumbs beginning when he was alive, the blue heron still in
flight on the water, the streetlights’ violet children beside it.

Unfold

& when I say end the poem I mean slit the poem’s
homily & holds hands with God’s omens hissing out, air
Grampa doesn’t breathe, animal staring back at me, her
fingerprints’ absence, & there are so many things that hum

with the desire to be fed, & the bird seed remembers
the ground around it’s ring finger & the soil where
kindnesses are shaped by water & hunger’s
call & re-song & can we train our memories

to belong to us, because I am going & I hope I carry
freedom from him with me, & I am going & I
hope I bury reason – he forgot it anyways,

& Gramma used to say you’re a fool to marry,
& I saw a blue heron among the already dead,
& where light plays telephone, even mountains paraphrase.

*

I open with a poem because a poem is an incantation, is, in itself, a spell.

To call back to the last line of the poem, I was thinking so much about paraphrasing as I put this together. This hybrid poetry series and talk engages with the use of layering, layering poems onto theoretical text, as if layering clothing: a dress stuffed into pants to make a familiar silhouette unfamiliar, broader shoulders, the coil of extra fabric almost like packing. Layering also here acts as if crafting a sigil, as I sometimes do, layering consonants from the language of my intentions, to make the legible illegible. Witchcraft is inherently steeped in mystery, is a strategy of illegibility, and so I layer genres of writing here to emulate that defamiliarization.

At the 2021 Sewanee Writers Conference, poet Tarfia Faizullah said, “The value of the uncanny is facing what unsettles us.” I imagine you may have been here before, talking about the specter of the uncanny. It feels like an incredibly familiar subject, particularly in academia. But I am revisiting it again here, returning as a way of articulating my own experience of gender, in relation to the horror, dreamwork, relationality, and unsettling mechanisms of the uncanny.

When he first defined it, Freud wrote, “The uncanny is that class of terrifying which leads us back to the familiar.” In other words, the uncanny is the horror of what we know, what we have often been unwilling to recognize or return to, to look at more closely. Hearing Faizullah explain this concept, I was struck by Freud’s evocation of the language of heimlich/unheimlich. “Heimlich” translates as belonging to a house or family, as opposed to wild, and “Unheimlich” meaning uneasy, eerie, blood-curdling. In her talk at Sewanee, Faizullah points out that these terms are not antonyms; rather, unheimlich is an enhancement of heimlich, an addition to. The uneasiness of house or family. The eeriness of the familiar. It is a layering on to the initial term. I find this heimlich/unheimlich layering interesting because it demonstrates how I have tried to describe non-binaryness, not as transitioning from woman to man, or stereotypically androgynous in an imagined middle, but my own femininity as menacingly familiar, exuberantly off-kilter, an eerie extension of. Most famously used to characterize the robotic housewives in Stepford Wives, the uncanny is both domestic and terrifying. It defamiliarizes.

The uncanny valley, then, is a term that emerged in the 1970s, coined by Masahrio Mori, to articulate, as Faizullah put it, the revulsion in response to humanoid robots that are highly realistic. But today I am talking about my own experience of gender. I am a white, able-bodied, English-speaking American who was socialized as a woman. I identify as non-binary, and sometimes use the language of transness, but here I want to speak specifically to non-binaryness, because I think in a way I have not been able to find elsewhere, heimlich/unheimlich captures the enhancement I aspire towards in my own expression of non-binaryness, as opposed to transition between, or aspirations of faithfulness to an original, real thing.

Frankly, I have tired of the term “non-binary” and come to this subject because I am looking for new language. Non-binary is still a term that implements a binary, must exist in relation to the oppressive history of gendered binaries. I am trying to relocate what my gender exists in relation to – where my valley lies – my friends, pop stars I love, small aesthetic vignettes I build in my outfits and surroundings. My non-binaryness being relational doesn’t make it false, but makes it interconnected, adaptable, proof of an ever-shifting nature. My non-binaryness is perpetually liminal. For a long time I wanted to pin my identity down, be able to make it palatable. I wanted to be seen. To be legible, even just to myself.

I live in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the United States, where I am a student of poetry. It is March 2022 and in Tennessee, bill SB 2777 was just advanced, meaning that teachers could have legal protection to misgender their students. There is a simultaneous desire to be recognized, and also a violence in having to decide exactly who I am. Isn’t the wonder of non-binary expression to revel in what is liminal? To always be expanding?

In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott writes, “Legibility is a condition of manipulation… Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organized in a manner to be monitored.” To make myself legible to the state, to society, to the people around me, puts me in a position to be surveilled. The strategy of the uncanny, then, is one of liminality, caught between not anymore, and not yet (Barnie Risman). The uncanny is frustrating and unsettling because it is not discrete or contained. It is not definite. It troubles legibility. What is the simultaneous privilege or protection of being legible to the state, and the danger of it? Hasn’t trans history been one of slipperiness? Of oral retelling? Of layering estimations and liminalities? Or, as Leah Tigress has put it,  “escaping the archive”?

*

I Begin & End with the People I Love
A Sonnet Crown on Non-Binary Legibility

Written in March 2022, after SB2777 is advanced in the state where I am a student of poetry
SB2777 would legally protect teachers to misgender their students

The first time she plucked my eyebrows: trowel
looting roots from my supraorbital
my sister made my tear ducts yowl
like twin wolves ballading silver comets

I made her prune them then with cuticle
scissors so instead of a removal
she pared back each brow hair: hemmed poodle-skirt
pervert garden bed stunted philia

Everywhere I walk seeds are possible
my sister pressed hours into metal
into quiet shapes so adolescence

could be beautiful for me I saddled
next to Mom to check it was legible:
those roots I kept: vernal: measured: lapels

*

The equinox prunes the darkness we’ve kept
All winter layers of lingerie wept
my body into being oh captain:
my Captain Crunch oh corset: my inflect-

ion of binders: difference made legible:
my eggshell hot pants ass slipping out egg-
cellent whites: life is enby D & slept-
in ball gowns road head girl gone wily fem

Leave behind my foreshadow: Wedding rice
Hair always growing out who decided
queer ethos means never getting there: Towards

being enough: Sappho won’t text me back
Gingko leaves press their ear sing to my lap:
[           ]

*

Tennessee sings for legibility
& whose song is my body sung for he

drums his fingers on my pronouns my breast
pocket introductory sticker most 

call after me & cut my name in half
cup of sugar chorus catchy enough

to recognize after the first listen
student only of my friends expressions

To misgender: shards in the wrong window
To engender: forked seeds in a spotlight
To gender: to be that sexy singer

Who says Americana & means it
Who writes rock landscapes his shoulders live in
Soft for redemption: false premonition

*

When you touch me in my softest places / my hands follow you there: at first impulse / to protect: cover: gesture modestness / but I arrive & join your hands in praise

We discuss ampersands & you buy a / Heifeweizen: you know I’ll hate IPAs / Your sorghum spit your sweet hilt pants betray / What is whimpering but summoned bouquets

What is bucking but attempts at flora / I jogged myself chaste: body bearing a / resemblance to landscapes: thighs Palisades

or lithe as East Coast rain: saliva / shares a Venn Diagram with the Divine / placelessness spits on my strap-on: turnpike

*

Terrance Hayes said I have no form because
I have no allegiance to form the clause

of each fem in the pond skinny dipping:
thresholds for each other: unsaid: dripping

in sexual unmentionables: moon
machinists: we make kaleidoscope boons

of the ways they ruin us we ration
sky & still twang blue pond in our teeth in

our palm lines: I pulse with blood of women
I don’t know: liminal & eyelet lace

 radius: decorata glass arbor vitae
[  ] percentage water costume jewelry

my friends call me into the pond my name
flashy too frivolous to be ashamed

*

I want my friends’ dreams to mean something big
meanwhile the state shakes us awake sprig

of lavender tucked in our pajamas
like knives still: Heather dreams of flying: awe-

stricken younger self watching: Brian dreams
of roller skating knees, red sky-gazing

Zenaida sends their joy-making playlists
& calls that a dream: Erin, who I kissed

in my own dreams, telepathically is
writing the same subject as me: kismet

prompts me to check my metaphysical
cupboards: jam jars turned water glass: recalls

Michelle Zauner’s women sharing trauma,
doing dishes & where are you: outlawed

*

I’m hem haw erotica but the law
would make me decide on discrete pink dreams
After so much time wanting to be seen
sex object syrup fantasy: declawed

Legibility my old dilemma
pet violence sprouting purple from dirt seams
Where my friends & I eat cherries sunbeams
Shellac is made from insect wings my jaw

shines smooth like road trip windows between states
friends’ couches chatter with my burlesqued name
My banana pepper blonde phase my bras’

push-up routine I could fit but my
people altar me: beautify me alive
dig up raunchy dimples: crude brows raised high

*

Questions I have asked before: do non-binary people just cast out the familiar? How can we return? Do I make the familiar unfamiliar? My poetry, my GNC friendships, are steeped in almosts, in puns, and resemblances, and mimicry of beautification rituals. I think here of the term “paronomasia” – that of a play on words, or a pun. I often feel I am trying to play a trick on the original phrasing. I enhance, make it funnier, grosser, distort it, do it wrong. Because often we are enhanced and made more of ourselves by each other, doing our makeup, practicing together. As Julissa Emile said in their keynote speech at the Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam Festival in 2020, we are realized in our friends’ mouths. So genders are communal happenings, relational, constellated expressions of gender. Feminine ritual is my witchcraft practice.

In “Exposing the Seams: Professional Dress & the Disciplining of NB Trans Bodies,” written by GPat Patterson and V. Jo Hsu, the authors define non-binary markings, one facet of this being that accessorization can act as self-assertion, and that “These accessories are not so much personal as social (V. Jo Hsu). They move through the article in stitches, sewing personal narratives together in order to reinforce their points. In this instance, the authors are referring to making their non-binaryness legible in the workplace – through trans flag stickers on their laptops, Pride posters on their office doors, pronouns in their email signatures. But I take the accessorization mentioned very seriously and literally, and want to emphasize that accessorization is a social act. Here, I accessorize with poems in a literary or academic space. I layer beautiful things, poems, images, associations with other artists until the sweetness is sickening. When I am the most in my gender, I am the uncanny valley girl. I aspire towards the dreaminess and oddity of the surreal. And what’s more is this is a spell that is done continuously with my grotesque and witchly friends.

Who has historically been called a witch? A big question that I will not answer in its entirety, but what feels true, is that those who have been called witches are those who are not performing womanhood in ways idealized by society. As I have begun to research collectivity, and relational understandings of gender, I have been drawn to the work of Surrealists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, who were witches and painters and writers. They escaped Europe during WWII and met in exile in Mexico City. According to the National Women’s Museum of Art in Washington, DC, “Though they painted separately, they did spend time together cooking, writing spells, and looking for ways to prank guests. Their mutual interest in alchemy is evident in their works.” Although they were part of a formal art movement, they were described as “femmes-enfants.” I am heartened by that childlike spirit, and their willingness to get carried away, to wander. I think of “Exposing the Seams” again, and author V. Jo Hsu saying, “So often the genres through which marginal communities share and build knowledge are dismissed as frivolous or anti-rigor (social media, letters, zines, etc.) but these queer ‘ephemera’ are the means through which other worlds are made possible” (Hsu). Often it is the work of feminine people that is deemed frivolous. Home-making, party-planning, sewing, decoration. To perform frivolousness is to perform incorrectly in the eyes of the patriarchy, yet frivolousness was the guiding principle of Carrington and Varo’s friendship.

*

Exquisite Corpse as Cootie Catcher
After Tyehimba Jess

Leonora Carrington wrote a speculative Surrealist novel about her friendship with Varo, called The Hearing Trumpet. The protagonist, Marian, uses the hearing trumpet contraption her best friend Carmella gives to her in order to navigate her life in a nursing home. The novel troubles the line between experiencing Alzheimer’s and a surreality the audience might buy into. Another reason this novel means so much to me calls back to my first poem here, about my Grampa and the ways his softness was emphasized in his years post-Alzheimer’s diagnosis. His interest in the crape myrtle trees. His tears over the beauty of a cardinal. In one of the first scenes with Carmella, when the hearing trumpet is given, Carrington writes, “We both sat down and sucked a violet scented lozenge which Carmella likes because it scents the breath; I am now getting used to the rather nasty taste and beginning to like them through my fondness for Carmella. We thought about all the revolutionary possibilities of the trumpet” (8). I think here of how friendship acts as a boon through a traumatic experience, like being forced into a nursing home, and beyond that, demonstrates how the vision of our friends can guide us into a future that might not be imaginable on our own (Simone Breton). At the end of The Hearing Trumpet, Marian and Carmella live underground in a post-apocalyptic world. My friends make me more adventurous and, as I gather from this example, Carrington was likely emboldened by Varo’s imagination. Carrington and Varo were grounded in the domestic and the metaphysical, the intuitive and internal space, even in the face of a world which sought to get them to distrust that, to decide they were frivolous. In the novel, Carmella literally gives Marian the tools she needs to hear the world around her, and what is that, if not a sacred covenant between witches!

Part of the drop-off in the original diagram of the uncanny valley includes a corpse, and of course as I talk about non-binaryness I am talking through the very tangible danger of this way of being. You might have heard of an Exquisite Corpse before, a Surrealist game turned classroom icebreaker. It is a communally written story or piece of art, where the paper is folded, and participants respond to the line of writing or drawing immediately before them. I became interested in the form because of the body horror suggested by the name; the influence of surrealism used at its best for visionary, collective storytelling; the literal folds and interruptions and forgetting inherent to the form; and the contemporary everyday use of it to provide levity and connection. Where the state cannot and will not protect me, the non-binary people I love and I care for each other.

*

I Turn My Eyebrows Into Swamp Flora
Uncanny Valley Girl Glose

Electric green phosphorescent ointment
so said my hooded lids to handsome chins
my first night out, a la Amanda Lepore pout,
winged. My four thieves vigor carried off men.                       

Familiar, my budding performance, how
a scream is heard for what it is. Brood curdled.
Helicopter leaf. Stupefied beasts for brows,
bristling on my bark, my skin, my coffin.

Old medicine of sweet wine & egg whites
to build my appetite for last rites. Who’s saved?
There is no damsel left of me, just bio queen,
ornery rearrangement of flowers,

doppelganger of who I dreamed I’d be
when I was young, crinoline collapsing.
I didn’t kill the girl – I am reaching
for her still as she flies over the edge.

* 

End Note: I used the glose poetic form in order to have something to respond to, a collaborative form, like the Exquisite Corpse. Each last line of each stanza is taken from the Leonora Carrington quote below. As the Exquisite Corpse is a game from the Surrealist tradition, I wanted to engage with her work.

“Some claim that the corpse was carried off by bees, & that
they have preserved it to this day in the transparent honey
of the flowers of Venus. Others say that the painted coffin did not
contain the princess at all but the corpse of a crane with the face of a woman,”
– “The Neutral Man” by Leonora Carrington

*

Although I am speaking about my own understanding of non-binaryness, I also believe that gender is constructed for all of us relationally, in how we are taught about our own performances and selves. I am wondering if I might invite you to take some time to make Exquisite Corpses in this space. When I first started writing them, people were confused that I wrote these poems alone. But for me, I always included quotes and lines and memories and aesthetics I learned from people I love. I believe to some degree we all start from those people, their movements, their gestures, their words. I am hoping I can invite you to start there now.

I think of the uncanny valley as a space for transmutation, where you take something and change it completely in form, so as to drop off the map almost of recognition, to unsettle. I think of the slant of the uncanny valley as it curves, the slant of my eyebrows from my frontal bone, the slant of arms on my friends as we lean into each other laughing so hard we are gasping, the slant way I talk about my gender to make it easier for other people, the slant of heimlich becoming unheimlich, the slant of camp and caricature in my expression of non-binaryness, the slant of witches who are not performing womanhood correctly, and so lean into something else entirely

❧

Sources (in order of appearance in essay)

Tarfia Faizullah’s Craft Talk on the Uncanny, Sewanee Writers’ Conference July 2021
“The Uncanny” by Sigmund Freud  (MIT Press Online)
“The Uncanny Valley” essay by Masahiro Mori, accessed via a translation of the original essay by Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki (Purdue Online)
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott
Barnie Risman’s Venn Diagram of Legibility
Leah Tigress, @9BillionTigers. “Trans people have often had oral histories, subcultural relationships, and jobs in the underground economy. It is helpful for me (as a historian) to remember that not everything needs to be analyzed, that escaping the record is often the intent.” Twitter, Feb 5 2022.
Julissa Emile’s keynote speech, Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam Festival October 2020
“Exposing the Seams: Professional Dress & the Disciplining of NB Trans Bodies,” by GPat Patterson and V. Jo Hsu (The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics)
“Artist Friendships: Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo” by Megan Masius, May 13, 2017. (National Women’s Museum of Art in DC)
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Simone Breton, quote found at the Metropolitan’s exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders
“The Neutral Man” from The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

---

Sara Mae is a high fem writer and style witch raised on the Chesapeake Bay. They are a 2022 Open Mouth Attendee, a 2022 Tinhouse Summer Workshops Alum, and a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference Scholar. Their work appears in or is forthcoming from American Literary Review, Underblong, Pigeon Pages, Hobart and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out via Game Over Books. They write shimmery rock music as The Noisy. They are currently an MFA candidate at UT Knoxville and an Associate Poetry Editor for Grist Literary Journal.

All the Better by Cassandra Bristow

Little Red is walking through the wood alone, eyes glued to the path in front of her, when she feels the first flicker of her hunger—her Wolf. She shudders with contempt. She hates the hunger, she hates the transformation it brings forth. Another sharp reverberation of need tugs at her stomach, teasing inevitability. It makes her angry. It makes her wince.
She hopes this will be one of those nights where she makes it home before the Wolf possesses her, before she loses herself to rabid sensations, feral as she searches for satiation. Her grip on the woven wood basket in her hand tightens. She could make it home in time if she hurries now.
I’m going to make it, she whispers to herself with firm certainty. As long as she believes it, she just might be right. She wants to carry this belief in her body, but her determined posture only leaves her muscles tenser than when she started. In response to her limbs’ stubborn ache, she deepens her clutch on the wooden basket handle, knuckles trembling as they turn even whiter. She’s going to reach her beloved grandmother’s cottage before the night completes its rapid descent, and that’s a promise. Even though dusk’s purple stain stretches across the forest, she hopes to make it home before everything is covered in a shroud of darkness. She won’t lollygag, especially if she truly intends to reject the Wolf’s advances tonight.
Her stomach shakes with hunger again.
Time is running out, Little Red.

In the beginning, back when Little Red was a child too young to
understand, she assumed the hunger to be literal.
This meant her response to the Wolf was eating everything she could.
Her mother would come home to find the girl practically hypnotized, eyes glazed over
as she continued to chew swallow and sit in the mess she’d made. Porcelain cookie jars were
reduced to scattered fragments across the ground, with plates strewn carelessly across their
kitchen table. Her stomach, despite being covered by her dress, was
visibly swollen. It puffed outward from the fabric as she continued to
shamelessly shove food past her lips, consumed by her ritual.

 With shock and horror, her mother suddenly grabbed her to shake her
from this spell. Immediately after this Little Red
promptly doused the kitchen’s tiled floor with vomit.  

She shakes her head away from this reverie fiercely, letting her hair swing against each cheek, stinging as it comes in contact with her skin. It’s pointless, thinking about appeasing her stomach with the bread for her grandmother in the basket. It wouldn’t satisfy her.

                Her grandmother
was the only person she’d ever loved and felt loved by in return.
That was the woman who stepped up to raise her while everyone else
was busy giving up. Red’s father, a man whose genetic pool happened
to carry this curse left Red with her mother when she was still a child, before either
could comprehend her hunger. She considered him an absolute coward—he left
because he knew. Her mother tried to understand for a few years before she ended up leaving too.

 Red remembers everything about the day her mother decided she was done.

She remembers the hunger,
how it festered in her organs until she lamented to the Wolf. How her mother
arrived to a child, her own flesh and blood, covered in self-inflicted wounds and foaming at the mouth,
surrounded by patches of fur and hair that littered every corner of the girl’s bedroom.

Red remembers the sense of knowing—this was the end. She saw it in her mother’s eyes.
She’d never see that face again, the one so similar to her own.   

Suddenly, jarringly, annoyingly, a harsh wind beats against her back. She shivers, wishing she were closer to home.  

She remembers her mother's tight clutch pulling her arm forward, firm
though it trembled as she dragged Red through the wood
for the first time, a mother and
a daughter trudging all the way down the path to grandmother’s cottage.
Of course, this would soon be a journey Red knew by heart, but all this was to come.
On that day, all she knew was that she now belonged to no one.

 In spite of Red’s resentment taking root, her grandmother
was a kind and patient woman, sure to repeat over and over again
that the lost little girl was loved. She swore with force that the father and mother
who left Red behind were wicked idiots—they’d lost the chance
to meet the most wonderful child. Each time she said it, stroking Red’s hair as the child
held back angry tears, there was love. Red could feel and see it, unmistakable within
 the old woman’s eyes and touch. Her grandmother devoted
her childhood to teaching her how to try and love
the beast inside her belly, making sure that Red never blamed herself for her parents’ neglect.

 Because of her grandmother Red grew up strong, learning to embrace herself and
push through any fear she might feel toward her own body’s capabilities and curse.
For the old woman herself had spent years plagued by the same beastly
affliction, so she considered 
it her responsibility to show Red how to regard her Wolf. She explained what might satiate the
beast, temporarily at least. She knew when the Wolf could starve for a little while, as well as when it was
best to feed the creature so that its next appearance wouldn’t involve a punishment toward Red.
Red and her Wolf grew to understand one another. They discovered together the empathy it
takes to coexist as two souls in one body, doomed to never feel satisfied.

 Once she was older and more comfortable with her Wolf, Red was able to negotiate with the
animal that it would only emerge in the woodlands after nightfall—As though we are closer to being a
werewolf instead. The Wolf understood and agreed to it mostly because at least now it could have a
place to roam freely. For there was anger still in Red’s soul toward the Wolf
and its insatiable hunger. Both of them knew it, feeling this lifelong grudge that urged her to
suppress this beast within. She couldn’t let it go—the Wolf was aware.  

Red’s skin buzzes as she walks along. Every inch of her feels electric and alert, ready for whenever the wind might strike. The anticipation leaves her feeling jittery and itchy. She stops herself abruptly and attempts to banish sensation by rubbing her hands over each of her limbs vigorously. Her fingertips are cold to the touch, and that doesn't change as she continues moving them up and down. She sighs. She’ll never get warm or comfortable. Sometimes she feels all there is to her is this emptiness, a hollowed-out feeling caused by the burden of her hunger. It suffocates her, this desire for satisfaction that will never arrive. As if responding to her fears, her stomach suddenly growls at her. She echoes a similar sound of displeasure in response, sneering at her own skin.
Cravings, cravings, cravings…

She looks up then, wondering if she ought to pray. Between the treetops and their leaves are gaps where pockets of the sky are visible. Sometimes she wishes she was one—a thing with leaves, sturdy and stable. A figure offering nothing but protection, caught somewhere between everlasting and already dead. She supposes were she to whisper some sort of plea, the words would be directed towards these very trees. After all, the woodlands have become a sort of second home, since they offer the Wolf a place of belonging. She smiles to herself, grateful for the rows of trees guarding her now. Indeed, each time she steps past the woodland threshold, she thanks this land for the sanctuary it provides her and her Wolf.
She’s barely resumed the rhythm of her journey when another breeze causes her hand to hit against the back of her head. Her hood has come off. Strange. Without a second thought, she jerks her arm to reach closer to her neck, grabbing at her coat. Her fingers curl around a lump of fabric resting between her shoulder blades. Damn. Usually she’s too aware of her hood for it to be absent. Is the hunger more intense tonight? Is that why she seems to lack a certain sharpness?

The wool coat had been a bright cherry color
back when it wasn’t yet worn, when it was a surprise gift
 from her grandmother, who always called the girl Little Red.

Red places the basket down between her feet before she lifts her arms to reach behind her. Tugging awkwardly at the weathered fabric, her fingers pause then pinch at the washed-out shade of burgundy. She thrusts it forward, letting the hood settle against her face. The frayed wool has a scratchy texture and she can feel rubbing at her cheekbones. A sensation so familiar to her that she can’t resist pausing to feel content. Although there are holes in her garment as well as a few buttons missing, her cloak has never failed to make her warm. With the hood in place, she feels gentle heat trickling down her body. Warmth moving through her, sweet and slow, like honey. She nods her head before leaning down for the basket, strolling along the path again. 

She never liked the nickname Little Red.
It only stuck because her grandmother made sure of it, asserting
it as her favorite term of endearment. At first Red hadn’t minded the
nickname, but then her grandmother sent her to school where all her classmates caught on
and teased her for it. 

After that, she wanted to rid herself of it so badly that she began to refuse to answer to it.
When that didn’t work, she took it a step further by informing everyone she knew that she
deeply loathed the color red. She tried to prove it through abstaining from red fruits. Red
apples, cherries, and raspberries were not allowed anywhere near her lips. She started coming to school
every day in the same lacy white slip that belonged to her grandmother, though the old woman wore it
beneath her clothes instead. The dress didn’t fit the small girl in any capacity;
she was forever placing the falling straps back upon her shoulders. It was also permanently filthy
around the bottom, the hem tattered and brown from the constant dirt and grime she dragged it
through. Once her grandmother realized she had been wearing that soiled slip everywhere, Red was
served tomato soup for dinner and strawberries for dessert. She ate without protesting, scared to utter a
single word of defiance toward her grandmother. The shared silence persisted between them long after
they finished the meal. Red braced herself for punishment but it never came, until she woke the next
morning and saw sullied white lace dangling from a tall tree branch very much facing her window.
After that, she embraced the nickname, promising to never dismiss the color red again.

Red—just Red—is sprinting across the forest, heart pounding in her ribcage because she’s almost out of time. Leaves close to her feet rustle loudly as she increased her speed, panting heavily as she barrels down the rapidly darkening trail. Night has at last reached the woods, the green treetops almost entirely diminished by darkness, stars slowly emerging as the only guiding light to lead her home. If she really doesn’t want the Wolf tonight, she’s got to arrive at her doorstep now.
Yet of course, given her fixation on the stretch of woods ahead, she fails to notice the large tree root until her foot catches against it. Her fall lurches her into the air, followed by the audible thud of her landing. She groans in the dirt and grass before rolling herself upright. As she brushes the debris off her coat, she knows she has no choice but to accept her fate. Tonight the woods will be her only home, as the Wolf’s inevitable arrival means Red’s grandmother will not see her until the sun rises in the sky once more.
Her grandmother! The basket!
Red jumps up to stand, wincing from the pain as it ripples through her. Her body would certainly be sprinkled with blue and purple bruises tomorrow, thanks to her own stupidity. She squints into the twilight, trying to spot the silhouette of her basket. She realizes quickly that her sight will fail her and falls gently to her knees, hoping this won’t create any extra bruises. She extends her hand outward and clumsily slaps at the grass and sticks and mud. She makes sweeping motions until she finally feels it—the smooth wooden grooves of her woven basket. She snatches the thing triumphantly, hugging the it tightly to her chest. She rocks back and forth and a small whimper leaves her lips, her kneecaps slowly sinking deeper in the dirt until it covers her shins and feet. There’s nowhere left to go. Not now anyway.
A ferocious roar rips through her stomach, reminding her what she already knows to be true: her body is going to become the Wolf’s—very, very soon. A shudder travels through her, eyes fluttering shut as she listens to woodland creatures, their hoots and chatters the only sounds in what would otherwise be silence.

Sometimes, Red can hear her grandmother praying through the walls.
In an earnest voice, the old woman begs her God to help
her granddaughter heal her angry heart, that she may learn to love
and be loved without any hesitation or guilt.
Amen.

The Wolf’s arrival reaches Red’s skin before anything else, prickling sharply down her neck. Despite knowing this ritual all too well, she trembles in the way she always does, her limbs convulsing from the fear that surges as its footsteps grow closer. Her new-moon hysteria has the rhythm of a siren song. She can feel it taunting her with its tune. She notes that her hood is currently nestled between her shoulders again, something she assumes happened when she tripped. Of course, there will be no gesture on her part to return the fabric back to its rightful resting place. Such movement would be utterly pointless now, when the Wolf’s grunts and growls are so crisp, as if the creature’s mouth is pressed against her ear.
Hot puffs of breath hit the back of her neck. She whimpers again, much to its satisfaction. Despite understanding one another, the Wolf still revels in their game, especially knowing that Red wishes it would end. Since the Wolf doesn’t get to hunt very much, it enjoys the chance to embody every fearsome predatory trait running through its blood.
A feral heat spreads through her, purposefully dripping down her flesh before it settles dangerously inside her bones. Red will soon forget herself, once her body is entirely relinquished to the Wolf. She will have a lapse consciousness, and it will last until the next stroll she takes down this woodland path. Only after she returns to the forest will her wolfish memories arrive. They emerge as foggy visions, as if the Wolf and the hunger are nothing more than figments of her imagination or creations that belong to some bad dream.
What a shame that’s not the case. The Wolf exhales against her neck, a warm breath that strives to claim her body. It is an attempt to seduce this blood and flesh, urging her to give in and at last renounce her name. They both know she will, but she resists, despite having agreed to the Wolf’s inhabitance. She doesn’t mean to, really she doesn’t—it’s just programmed into her. Perhaps her angry heart is the one to blame.
To show she consents to the Wolf’s possession, she bends her left elbow, slowly raising her arm upward so her palm brushes against her neck. Hot breath now runs across her knuckles, but not for long. Grunting in satisfaction, the Wolf greedily responds to her simple movement by digging its knifelike claws into her throat. Now its mouth is truly against her ear, its drool wet and sticky on her skin.
Promise you won’t keep fighting me tonight, Little Red.
She nods in agreement. In response, the Wolf roars triumphantly, a shout which echoes through her body and the forest, traveling down the trail that was meant to bring her home moments ago. When the semi-silence returns, Red realizes she is crying, something that also ends up happening every time. It’s because she hates this part, when her body still resists the transformation despite her willingness to let it occur. Though the pain is fleeting, it’s so severe she can’t forget it. Her muscles twitch with defiance, but soon surrender to the Wolf’s entrance.
The beast begins to control her, twisting her limbs until her body contorts into unnatural and excruciating shapes. Red desperately switches her focus to the stinging feeling in her throat caused by swallowing her pleas for mercy, the last thing of her agency. It reminds her that her body is not her body but a vessel, one that belongs to something beyond what she considers to be herself, some other piece of her existence. She will never be able to fully claim this flesh, these muscles, the organs which keep her soul alive. None of it is hers. Never has been, and never will be either. Though she wouldn’t dare say this to her grandmother, Red considers her inability to ever live inside a body that is entirely her own to be the greatest curse of all.
She thinks of this as life slips from her grasp, almost gone entirely. Her mind falls away in pieces, one after the other. Using the last breath tethered to her in this body, she musters an exhalation, a promise meant to reach her grandmother— Little Red will be home when morning comes.

Another howl tears through the trees, the Wolf’s head thrown backward as it rejoices in this return to its body. A deep grin stretches across its face as it looks down the pathway before it. The night has begun at last.
Expanding its comfort within this body, the Wolf leans backwards so that the spine, its spine, curves into an arch. Bones crack loudly from the bend. It’s leaning so far back that fur and hair tickle the grass which was once behind its head. The Wolf thrusts all its limbs forward in one sweeping, graceless gesture, its stomach pressed harshly against both thighs. Sinking into the stretch, the Wolf folds further into its own body. In this position, every vertebrae within the spine protrudes, bones visibly pushing against flesh as if they’re all preparing to rip through the skin.
How marvelous it would be, the Wolf thinks, to feel my bones free from this shared body.
It rolls both shoulders, followed by stretching and cracking both arms. As the Wolf hasn’t yet tried to stand, it wobbles a bit once both feet force it upright, adjusting to the need to balance. Now that it feels properly back inside its body, the Wolf runs toward the trees. Startled birds flee quickly as it approaches, prompting a wicked cackle to come from the beast’s mouth.

NOW WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG, BAD WOLF?

TONIGHT I’VE GOT TEETH

ALL THE BETTER TO EAT YOU WITH!

To hunger is a terrible, wretched thing.  

Just this morning I woke wrapped up in
what I think it means to be a woman wanting, lips
pressed against sheets stained by my spit
from always sleeping with an open mouth.  

Yet somehow caught within this haze
I felt certain I’d figured out what it would take for me to conquer
what I consider to be hunger.  

Don’t think that I’m referring to that bodily tug
which audibly roars through the stomach when a person
urgently needs to eat.  

This hunger is more of an abstract feeling, 
one both insatiable and all-consuming,
buried deep within my bones.
It comes close to existing as this
terribly severe feeling of desire, of wanting
something so intensely though you cannot begin
to explain what it is.

 Where physical hunger debilitates you,
this feeling pushes you.  

I find it strikes the hardest when what I’m craving
drives me wild. For this feeling always manages to convince me that, as long as
I am not satisfied, the eternal emptiness will linger, still gnawing at my soul.
Hunger wouldn’t be so terrible if it wasn’t so impossible to ignore.
It inspires my ongoing plight for satisfaction, all of which
seem to end with a lack of nourishment each time.
Sometimes a temporary fix comes along and I suck at the bones of it
until there’s no meat left, briefly full. 
Inevitably this morphs into self-punishment, back to being just another
hollowed body in the end. 

Will I ever let myself be nourished?
In the beginning I used to fight it, but not anymore.
For no matter how hard I resist the hunger
it will always be there, waiting to devour me again.  

These days I prefer to greet it like an old friend.
Familiar and safe enough that I submit to it immediately
after it flickers through my stomach, letting it
swallow me whole so we’re now both living within
each other’s beastly bellies, consumed.  

Certainly there is hunger
living amongst other prowling predators.
Sometimes I picture them all hunting together, concealed
drooling creatures watching carefully as they wait.
These animals could be hiding anywhere, for they want this
attack to be rather unexpected. Prey is much easier
to conquer and consume when unprepared
for the killer pounce. 

Hunger likes to come across
as this big surprise, defeating you with one
swift and sudden movement. A seemingly effortless victory as if
Hunger isn’t methodical and calculating and doesn’t take its time
planning the next attack (it does). After all,
isn’t slow and steady what always wins the race?

I’ve got a good feeling about tonight.

Saliva pools at both corners of the Wolf’s mouth, drool dribbling down its chin in response to another ravenous fantasy. Just knowing that anything could happen excites the wolf. A starry woodland sky holds endless possibilities for satisfaction. A low growl echoes through its stomach in eager anticipation, which the Wolf mimics.
It’s time to begin tonight’s search for satiation.
The Wolf’s tongue curls to swipe all across its lips in a slow and purposeful manner. This is the last thing left to do before the hunt can properly transpire—make sure not one single drop of its own blood remains, waiting for the Wolf to take a taste. It isn’t sure how much time it has taken this night, licking and sucking the blood from all its wounds. Sometimes it goes on for hours, this cycle of ripping, biting, and nursing. Other times it is quick, in a rush to begin its hunt and capture.
The Wolf has been brutal tonight, leaving no corner of its flesh without gashes and wounds. From head to toe it is grotesque, blood smeared across its pelt, fur flattened by its own sticky substance. There are obvious teeth marks wherever pink hairless flesh is visible. Alas, self-mutilation has done nothing to appease the Wolf’s appetite. The cravings run feverishly through its body.
With a determined sneer, the Wolf places both its paws and knees down on the ground. It howls, throwing its head back before propelling itself into a vicious sprint, galloping through the woods on all fours. Under the new moon, the Wolf cries out once more with the earnest request that the night offer satisfaction and the hunt will end with nourishment provided.

I have considered hunger’s diminishment.
In fact I have considered it time and time again
because of how intrinsic this feeling is to my soul and body.  

 Hunger reminds me that I’ll never
truly be satisfied, and I remind Hunger
that’s something I already know—no matter what I do
things will always end in nothing. 

I walk home
with my tail
between my legs.

Hunger devours
my surrender and my shame.  

I’ll never be satisfied.  

Hunger ostracizes,
twirling me through its otherness
until I’m dizzy, a descent to the
ground induced by my woozy state. I am
once again considering the—my—diminishment.  

The Wolf is frantic and enraged.
Dawn makes its presence known, the sky changing color, but the Wolf needs more time. It can’t leave the woods behind, not yet. It still hasn’t found a single bite worth taking. Not a morsel has appeared. There is nothing, nothing to provide the Wolf with the slightest hint of satisfaction! It begins to wail then, a strangled sound of starvation and hopelessness emits from its anxious throat:

Please—I need to be nourished.
I can’t keep starving like this for that much longer.

I want to wake up
tomorrow or the next day feeling different, but
I know there is always nothing.
Hunger begins and ends the same, every single time.

The radiant pooling light of early morning nudges Red awake.
She blinks, bleary-eyed and yawning as she props her groggy self upright. The Wolf has left her on the doorstep of her grandmother’s cottage. She smiles softly with gratitude at its kindness, hoping the Wolf can feel her think it.
She’s awake enough now to inspect her body. How much harm did the Wolf inflict last night? A lot, she thinks. Her fingers run gently down her legs to trace the bloodstains, trailing up to her collarbone only to spiral toward her stomach. She’s lucky to never feel these marks as open wounds—any bites or bruises the Wolf gives itself on their shared vessel are completely healed come morning. Despite this aspect of the curse, she still likes to investigate her flesh when it is indeed hers once again. Besides, the red color coating her body seems to sparkle in the early morning sun.
However, this much blood coating her skin indicates that the Wolf had been unable to nourish itself during its twilight prowl. She sighs. Red and Wolf, defeated yet again by this shared hunger. What an indestructible force it is. Part of her pities the Wolf for feeling it even more intensely than she does.
Though her resentment toward the Wolf is strong, she knows it wants the same thing she does: freedom. For if the Wolf were indeed able to truly vanquish this hunger, it would be free and Red would no longer be subjected to transformations or any sort of hunt and capture. She knows how badly they want this, both selfishly and for each other. She shakes her head. Thinking about it for too long makes her heart grow heavy in her chest.
Red stands up only to recall the bruises on her skin. She winces, cursing herself for tripping over that tree root. Now, with her throbbing wounds in mind, she straightens out her ragged red coat slowly and gently. Once she feels it’s properly resting on her shoulders, Red grabs her basket. The Wolf has placed it in a patch of grass, close to where her head lay just a moment ago. She feels presentable.

Red enters her grandmother’s cottage. Inside, the old woman is busy setting the table for their breakfast, her brow furrowed as she ensures that each plate is in perfect alignment. Red takes a deep breath and steps closer to her grandmother, exhaling the warm smell of the kitchen—citrus and slightly burnt bacon. She can taste them on her tongue.
The two take their seats across the way from one another. They chew and swallow and clear their plates. Red looks up to see her grandmother smiling at her. Red smiles back. They laugh together lightly.
It’s good to have you home.

---

Cassandra Bristow (she/her) is a Brooklyn, NY-based writer and visual artist. Her work can be found in online publications such as Quail Bell Magazine and Lithium Magazine. Cassandra additionally curates and distributes a self-published, DIY zine called Oral Rinse to combine her passions for writing, community, and collaboration.

The Knife Speaks by Heather Bartel

a tarot reading performed with Sylvia Plath and a shot of whiskey

I. THE FOOL

We travel. Free and whole and unalarmed until sideswiped by the consequences of possibility: expectation, revelation, vertigo. The stepping over the edge before realizing the edge was there. The failure to heed any warning, body in the sun, unaware of itself.

The telephone rings, it has something to say. The telephone rings, almost something living, an almost connection, illuminated phantom until the screen goes black. A mirror in my pocket: I can find my face in it. But before a phone was a mirror, it came in parts. There used to be two halves: the piece plugged into the wall and the part we held onto, handle-shaped, in the hand and to the ear and the mouth, we cradled it, we called it the receiver. Giving and receiving, these two halves: a process like splitting the brain into left and right. Still the same brain but still no one can see it. Still the same mirror but whose face is mine—I cannot hang up this mirror anymore in a way that makes noise, cannot slam the phone down can only slide a finger across the glass, let it go black, let it become again a void, dread still humming, dizzying as a mirror.

A knife, too, has a handle to hold on to.

A knife carves its words into surfaces—tree bark, plaster, skin. Words that appear, too, on the surface of the phone kept in my pocket, the pocket where some people also keep knives folded, waiting to flick open, to slash, to strike. The message is the same every time: keep reading. The tarot cards say it too. A rearrangement of images but still the same story, the game is discovering which page we will start with this time.

Today it is a rearrangement of the same words: today, she is.

II. QUEEN OF SWORDS

I think I might be Sylvia Plath reincarnate. I study her features in the mirror. That I am her double is unremarkable: we all have a shadow, even at night. In the cards I am The Emperor, Aries, my moon The Devil, Capricorn; my self a shadow, the shadow of chaos, the chaos internal of the unforgiving self. I am a wildfire; I am scorched earth. I am Sylvia and she was ruled by Death. My eyes are grey but hers are greyer. Features go unshaped: when I am her, a nose is just a nose. I watch her face as I touch myself and I want to make her come, know I am making her come, finger slipped inside, hot pulsing, she is coming now, we are coming, we are coming together. We finish. She grins at me, we grin at each other, vibrating, red flush, the mirror a cold violence, the lover to lean into. I press my forehead against hers and feel the fever, see the fog spread with my breath, I touch the glass with the tip of my tongue and she receives it. She gives me her ear and I take, share the message through our secret game of telephone: I want to spend my life with you becomes I want to spin my life with you I want to spin my life untrue I want to spin a web or two I want to be a spider I want to spy on her I want to lie beside her I want to die beside her   I   want   to   die.

This dark thing that sleeps in me, I guess you could say I’ve a call. I know the bottom, oh, you strange girl—how you lie and cry after

what   long   ago   hurt.

III. SIX OF CUPS

I wish I was the kind of person who found satisfaction in screaming. Instead of screaming, I think about space. In space, I hear, there is no sound, no echo within the vacuum, unlike the roar behind the darkness when my eyelids fall shut. I wonder if in space I could even hear my own heartbeat. I wonder if I could even see my own breath. Could infinity be coffin-like? Both death and the universe traps that trap because to enter into either means going no farther, nowhere else to go from here. I hear space is cold, but so is the mirror. So is the blade of a knife, smooth and sharp, it’s velvet, it’s crystal, it’s ice. Sylvia and I are both looking. Or if I am her, I am history repeating, the woven pattern, to be trapped within and broken through, strands of infinity left sticking in my hair, echoes of screams that were released centuries ago still piercing the quiet and each one is a reminder I’ve encountered the truth: neither knife nor phone is mirror. A phone is only a phone and a knife is only a knife and I am the only one speaking, I am the one who is speaking, I am the one in the mirror, I’m sad, I’m sad.

Another misunderstanding: I am a disaster becomes don’t look at me.

I’ll scream but the noise of it will not mean anything, will not translate to anything other than sound. I’ll scream but only as long as I am breathing, the echo of my emptiness will drift onward into space.

The truth is I don’t want to be myself today.

Death is the only story I know, my body the process.

IV. THE MOON

Awareness has neither a center nor boundaries. Awareness is a house at night with the lights turned off, awareness is a mirror, there is always a mirror, there is always a mirror and I see from both sides. Every choice is an illusion and with each choice I risk an opening, like a star that punctures the night. A star is a shaped thing and it is a word, when it’s written; a word is a voice is a light. I am her echo. The reflection of my face is never enough. I look again and return to the beginning, an offering: you choose now, you choose. But it is unclear when the beginning ends and the body becomes itself, the one doing the choosing rather than receiving the suggestion. A body does not choose to come into being, a mind does not choose the body it inhabits, and we do not choose to be born but then here we are, and here is the mirror reminding us we are seen. Here is the mirror, offering me a face I don’t recognize as mine. Here is the mirror, saying oh you strange girl. Here is the mirror, saying now you choose.

I skirt around the subject by stepping out of the frame. Instead of unplugging my phone from the wall, instead of yanking, I slide my finger across the screen to turn it off. The transformation is as satisfying as stillness becoming stillness. The cold, dead rock of the moon offers the possibility of renewal when it appears in blackness, when the moon goes new, dark enough to see myself by, there goes my shadow, she’s walking at night.

If I can reconstruct my mind to make sense of its calamity, if I can reinvent the mirror as that which reflects my body rather than that which deceives, if I can readapt to a knife in the kitchen as only a knife, if I can close my eyes without wanting to scream—

I might stand a chance.

Or if I stand before the glass again and then lean toward it, just a little bit closer, if I lean in and catch her eye again and see that it’s my eye and we are the same—to die beside her.

She winks at me.

She offers a beginning.

Now, you choose.

---

Author’s note: This dark thing that sleeps in me, I know the bottom, and how you lie and cry after it are all borrowed from “Elm” by Sylvia Plath; I guess you could say I’ve a call is borrowed from “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath; oh, you strange girl is borrowed from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.

---

Heather Bartel is a deeply rooted Midwesterner currently living in Athens, GA. She is founder and editor of the literary journal and community, The Champagne Room. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Qu, MAYDAY, Fence, and Heavy Feather Review.

An Interview with Lisa Marie Basile

Grimoire Issue IV poetry contributor Lisa Marie Basile is a poet, essayist and editor living in NYC. She's the founding editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine, an online magazine & community dedicated to poetry and writing, magical living, and ideas. She’s also the author of two nonfiction books exploring accessible ritual, healing, and writing—The Magical Writing Grimoire and Light Magic for Dark Times. She’s also the author of NYMPHOLEPSY (co-authored by Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein), which is included in the Best American Experimental Writing 2020 anthology, as well as other poetry collections. Her essays and other work can be found in The New York Times, Catapult, Narratively, On Loan from the Cosmos, Sabat Magazine, and more. She earned a Masters's degree in Writing from The New School and studied literature and psychology as an undergraduate at Pace University. You can follow her at @lisamariebasile and @Ritual_Poetica.

We caught up with Lisa recently to celebrate the publication of her second nonfiction book, The Magical Writing Grimoire, which was published by Fair Winds Press in April 2020.

Some of the many things we loved about this book: The way ritual is writing practice is ritual, showing how the two have always been inseparable. How spells are capacious: they are affirmations, and questions asked of the universe, and societal critique, and more. The specific rituals for psychological interrogation and healing. The openness of the prompts—so many books about writing turn it into drudgery. Your book emphasizes possibility and creating space for magic to come in. What are your favorite bits, and why?

I loved writing about writing and dream rituals, poetry as spellcraft, bibliomancy, embracing the shadowy side of your sun sign, and tarot writing. But I think the rituals I love to write the most are the ones that focus on healing — letters to the dead, giving your shadows a name, writing to your younger self. I’m a Scorpio, it’s in my nature, haha!

This is your second nonfiction book. How was writing this different from your first nonfiction book, Light Magic for Dark Times (which we also loved)?

I feel like these books are siblings! Light Magic for Dark Times was meant to be a book of accessible rituals and practices for anyone to use in a myriad of situations — when feeling burned out, feeling gaslit, feeling creatively drained, experiencing grief. It has a writing chapter, too! The Magical Writing Grimoire is a bit more in-depth, and it focuses on not just moving through trauma or crisis, but finding presence, balance, and self (as well as healing) all through (also accessible) writing-based rituals. Rituals might include bibliomancy, automatic writing, or guided meditation journaling.

I loooooved writing both of these. I know they’re not for everyone — they’re not your standard witchcraft book, they’re super accessible, they’re heavy on shadow work, and they don’t follow one path or practice — but they’re made from my heart.

What are your feelings about other books at the intersection of writing craft, self-help, and spiritual practice, like Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way? We were grateful you avoided pitfalls like unconscious privilege and assigning binary gender to the inner self. Do you have favorite writing, self-help, or witchcraft books you love and return to? Any you’ve found to be actively harmful to your practice?

I have turned to a wide array of books and people over the years; some were perfect for the time. I used The Artist’s Way a while ago. It played a role in my life at that time, for sure, although there is some language that I take major issue with in the work. I love Women Who Run With The Wolves, Writing Down the Bones, and even books like The Art of Death: Writing The Final Story (Danticat) because it enables me to do a sort of shadow work through the craft of writing.

There’s a book called Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions. I also adore zines that embrace writing as magic, like one I picked up at HausWitch called Conjure: Zines As Ritual Magic by Nyxia Grey. There’s so much out there — and sites like Mooky Chick; Yes, Poetry; and Grimoire that offer magic, literature, spell-poems, and rituals — always inspire me too. Audio journeys like Joanna Devoe’s Shadow Love and some lunar self-care rituals from The Glam Witch.

I avoid any sort of self-help stuff that relies too much (for my taste) on gender, asks me to “raise my vibes” in order to escape poverty or avoid thinking about serious issues lest I give them power, or blames the victim/tells me that I am subconsciously asking for my pain or allowing it because I want to punish myself. Not my thing. There’s a lot of ideas out there — and sometimes I don’t even recognize the issues that work for me or don’t work for me right away. I am always learning.

You write about chronic positivity as something you’re actively resisting in this book, and we appreciated that. The inclusion of giving back in your spell-work and a section on manifestation work as community-building practice may already answer this question, but what are your best recommendations for avoiding chronic positivity?

Thank you! I think an issue with chronic positivity (“good vibes only!” or “everything will be work out”) is that it gaslights others and yourself; it can be avoidant and negligent. Sometimes things don’t work out and we need to sit with that and make a change. Anger, sorrow, jealousy — these are all feelings that can be used for energy and used as catalysts for change and personal transformation. It’s the big feelings that guide us. As a scorpio, I feel like the shadow self is where the change happens. Some of the wisest people in my life healed from tremendous traumas by actively digging into the reality of tough emotions and thoughts.

I like to tell myself to feel the negative feelings, and give them the space and gravitas they deserve. I also do some journaling to get the Source of the feelings. I let them just be. I try to be careful with my language and let others know that stuff just sucks sometimes rather than write off their feelings with a sweeping, “love and light” affirmation. All of that said, avoiding toxic positivity doesn’t mean sitting in negativity; it just means embracing the shadow.

What was it like working with your artist? How did you find someone who got you and what you were trying to do with this book?

Oh my gosh, Ada Keesler (@adagracee on IG) is so damn talented. Ada designed my first book, Light Magic for Dark Times. My publisher assigned Ada to work with me, and we worked with Ada again for the Grimoire. I envisioned all the illustrations and the vibe, then Ada took my vision and ran with it. So versatile and dynamic and she really captures the magic and softness I was going for. I got lucky because Ada is very talented and intuitive.

Your audience for The Magical Writing Grimoire, and for Luna Luna, contains both novices and advanced practitioners. How did you strike a balance between your own idiosyncratic practice of witch- and word-craft with more general advice? Do you have an ideal reader for this book?

Hmm, I don’t have an ideal reader, really; I think whoever finds their way to the book and appreciates its inclusion and adaptability would be my ideal reader, I suppose — because I want people to come away feeling like they can embrace (and create) something sacred in a way that feels accessible to them. Poets, dreamers, witches, word-witches.

I try to write books like I’m telling a good friend something but sprinkle in the literary and the things I’ve learned along the way. I always trust the audience (and am informed by them, too; I often do forms and questionnaires before projects like books to get a sense of what would speak to people — and then I keep that it mind when writing what feels right to me). 

The references you cite in these pages are eclectic and wide-ranging, from Mary Karr to Octavia Butler to Edwidge Danticat to Anais Nin. Could you talk a bit about your influences as you were working on The Magical Writing Grimoire?
I have a shelf in my room where I keep all of my favorites. Things that I return to and read during certain seasons or in certain episodes of my life. Many of those voices made their way into my book. I essentially kept a long notebook of quotes and thoughts and passages from my favorite writers, musicians, activists, poets — and applied some of those to the book, too. I just wanted to offer some little gems here and there, to get the reader thinking, to add to the ideas and feelings.

Do you have a favorite or reoccurring dream or dream image you’d be willing to share, and why it clings to you?

I see the number 33 everywhere — in my dreams, in my waking life. The computer says it’s 3:33 when I look. I open my phone to see 33 likes on a post. It’s 33 after when the train comes. Everything, all the time. I was born on 11/3, so perhaps there’s a connection there, plus 33 is a holy number according to most numerologists. It feels really auspicious and beautiful and comforting. I like to think it’s just a reminder of divinity.

Excerpts from What To Do by Diane Goettel

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, approximately 19 percent of U.S. adults experienced mental illness in 2018. That’s over 47 million people, and I’m one of them. So many of us are invisible—going about our lives and work under a heavy, dark cloud of depression; in the grips of silent, white-knuckled panic. Our stomachs shriveled and starving; our blood calling out for tablets or powder or tar.

One of my dearest friends, also a member of our club of 47 million, has matching tattoos on her wrists. One says HOLD FAST in classic blue-black ink. The other, FAST HOLD, is almost impossible to make out unless you look very closely. But under a blacklight it stands out in glowing relief. In order to survive with a mental illness and keep your life—specifically, your career and relationships—intact, you need to hold fast, you need a fast hold. You’ve got to keep your mental illness on a very tight tether. You know what they say about an inch and a mile.  

But what if we allowed ourselves to go just a little bit mad for a day, an hour? What if, instead of yoga or meditation or therapy, we developed a daily practice of contained madness? My in-progress manuscript, What To Do, offers bespoke rituals for how to go briefly ‘round the bend, then circle back to everyday life.

❧

It goes without saying that you never wanted this. Some people are taken in by the glamorous madpeople of literature, the electric lunatics of the stage and screen. You might know someone who’s emblazoned their flesh with a Joan of Arc tattoo. But you know better; you know that going crazy is ugly and painful. You know that if you’re able to circle back to sanity after going round the bed, the person you rediscover in the mirror will just be older and have fewer friends. So you hold on with white knuckles. You hold fast.

But what if there were another way? What if you could step right up to the edge and return home at the end of the day unscathed? What if you let your madness out for a day, and ran alongside it in the fresh air? Or what if you ditched your yoga practice for a daily exercise in unraveling? Would that make a difference? Would that make the difference? Here’s what to do.

3.

Round up every yellow thing you own, even things that are simply verging on yellow. Don’t forget about the contents of your refrigerator (butter, bananas, frozen egg bagels). Put them all in a closet. Wait a week, maybe ten days. Then put everything back. 

5.

Take a roofing job. Then, photocopy your entire journal. (If you don’t keep one, a collection of correspondence and bank statements will suffice.) Cut each copied page into small square pieces. Put a few in your pocket every day before leaving for work. When the boss isn’t looking, tack these scraps beneath the shingles. 

7.

Buy a safe, a very expensive safe, a safe that will be hard to break into. Put inside of the safe whatever it is that you should not have. The decision of what exactly to put into the safe is up to you. It could be a picture. It could be heroin. It could be a telephone number that you should not call. (However, in this case, if you have the number memorized, you should lock up the phone as well.) Once the thing that you should not have has been locked away, have the door of the safe welded shut. If your safe is quite large, you may have to hire a welder who makes house calls. 

Now what to do?

You may sit by the safe. You may slap its face. You may wrap your arms about it. You may bring it into your bed, cry into the sealed door as if it were the chest of a lover. 

8.

Collect the most important and precious objects you own. The jewelry, the letters, the deeds and wills, the fingernail clippings and worry dolls, the bottle of pills. Make sure to seal anything that could be damaged by water in tight plastic. Put everything in a bag. Put the bag in your car. Put your car in drive and head for the nearest body of water.

When you get to the water, stand at the edge for a moment. Then turn around. Facing the land, reach into your bag and, one by one, toss those precious things into the water. You may wail while doing this. 

Be sure to throw as hard as you can. Listen to the splashes. 

Wait at least ten minutes. 

Turn around. Face the water. Go after them. Go fish. 

10.

Invest. Or don’t. 

❧

I was diagnosed with panic disorder and general anxiety disorder at the age of 19. This means that now, at age 37, I’ve been living with the most common form of mental illness for about half of my life. For almost two decades, I’ve been holding fast. Writing this manuscript, just imagining what it would be like to loosen my grip for a moment, has offered some relief.

Diane Goettel is the Executive Editor of Black Lawrence Press. She lives in Mount Vernon, New York, with her family.

Meditations on an Echo in a Cave, Part 1 by Matthew Burnside

A Brief History of the Coffee/Tea Break in Nintendo’s Mother Series, Writing as Getting Lost, Bombs, Wolves, Wax Jesus, & the Art of Pretending to Pray

1. When I was a kid I didn’t understand the concept of praying, like at all. So I faked it. Every single time, I faked: put my hands together & pretended, just in case, going through the motions. Made a cave with my fingers clasped to clutch at light. To amplify the signal. I never did say Dear God though. I figured, if God was really God, He had no use, nor time, for such formalities.

2. In the mid ‘90s, my temple was a series of interconnected hamster tubes for humans called Discovery Zone. This was my second favorite place next to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, with its uncanny valley of wax celebrities & kitsch exhibits. (I was particularly partial to the interactive tour of Jesus Christ’s life, though to this day still retain the mental scars of seeing a secondhand deity melting aloft on his cross due to harsh lighting, a defective version that would be subsequently yanked down & replaced with a dubious Matthew McConaughey-looking knockoff savior.) But I digress…

3. In Super Nintendo’s Earthbound (otherwise known in Japan as Mother 2), there was a scene that always captivated young me. About halfway through the game, as I remember it—maybe a bit later?—if you deign to drink a cup of coffee at a certain place at a certain time, you will be treated to a hypnotic metafictional pep talk, directly addressed to the ostensible “you.” The text reads as follows: 

You've traveled very far from
home... 

Do you remember how your long
and winding journey began with
someone pounding at your door?
It was Pokey, the worst person in
your neighborhood, who knocked
on the door that fateful night.

On your way, you have walked,
thought and fought. Yet through
all this, you have never lost your
courage. You have grown steadily
stronger, though you have
experienced the pain of battle
many times. 

You are no longer alone in your
adventure, Paula who is
steadfast, kind and even pretty,
is always at your side.
Jeff is with you as well.

Though he is timid, he came from
a distant land to help you.
Ness, as you certainly
know by now, you are not a
regular young man... You have
an awesome destiny to fulfill. 

The journey from this point will
be long, and it will be more
difficult than anything you have
undergone to this point. Yet, I
know you will be all right. When
good battles evil, which side do
you believe wins? Do you have
faith that good is triumphant? 

One thing you must never lose is
courage. If you believe in the
goal you are striving for, you will
be courageous. There are many
difficult times ahead, but you
must keep your sense of humor,
work through the tough
situations and enjoy yourself.

When you have finished this cup
of coffee, your adventure will
begin again. Next you must pass
though a vast desert and
proceed to the big city of
Fourside.

Ness...
Paula...
Jeff...
Poo...

I wish you luck...

(For the complete experience, a YouTube video of the sequence is available here.)

4. At its best, writing is a kind of perfect loneliness that’s not loneliness at all because you’re having a dialogue with a stranger through time & space, whoever happens to be reading it truly on the other end; at its worst, writing is just loneliness amplified—words go skittering but they remain unheard, clung in the crevices, like pinprick echoes in a cave.

5. Stalactites aren’t antennas.

6. Helllooooo?                                                               Is anybody out there?

7. The first & last time I sat in the pews of a church I felt nothing of the holy spirit. The first time I almost died, bobbing on my tippy toes in a swimming pool & gasping for air, I felt nothing of the holy spirit. The second time I almost died, racing down a steep hill on my Ninja Turtles skateboard on my belly into rushing traffic & diving off at the last second only to watch the board split in half, I felt nothing of the holy spirit. The first time I saw Earthbound’s coffee / tea sequence as a lonely kid alone at night, I wept & felt something like holiness for the very first time.

8. The point is: Getting lost was an important part of my childhood. I would take long walks around my hometown, barefooted & hauling a long stick, tramping up & down the streets of my neighborhood in search of secret geographies I didn’t already know or recognize. Sometimes I would scale trees or wade deep into the sewers, imagining I had entered a lush cavernous alien landscape, to my mother’s eternal scowling disapproval. My collection of scuffs, grass stains, & socks soggy with stale water always betrayed these meandering excursions, & too soon my license to wander untrammeled by adult supervision would be revoked.

9. Writing, too, is a kind of meandering—widening path of spiral eye toward the pain. Putting together a self piecemeal from assorted junkparts & possibilities.

10. Are you listening? Is anybody? Are you reading this truly, or only going through the motions of reading it?

11. An early title for this piece was Instructions for Building a Bombproof Heart at the End of the World in Spite of the Wolves, So Full of Their Dreaming, Rooting Around the Neighborhood for Any Little Scrap of Light Left to Fill Their Loved-Starved & Bulging Bellies. But at some point I realized the piece had nothing to do with wolves or bombs or hearts.

12. Thusly, Discovery Zone offered a relatively safe environment in which to explore the labyrinthine ductwork of my own imagination. There were chasms, shafts, tunnels, corners, corridors. Ziplines, ball pits, twisting slides. Zigs & zags of scaffolding over which to climb & claustrophobic tunnels galore through which to clamber & snake my fragile-boned body. Most importantly, there were places to hide high above the world; perfect spots out of which to peek through a latticework of netting, down upon which I could peer in silent witness the busy world bustling below.

13. If you deign to drink a cup of tea at a certain time in a certain place in Earthbound, here’s the scrolling text you’re treated to (full experience here):

Like a great tapestry, vertical and
horizontal threads have met and
become intertwined, creating a
huge, beautiful image.

You may have cursed this never-
ending journey. You have known
injury and defeat, but you have
struggled on to reach this place.
Your in-born intelligence and
courage have helped bring you
here. You have believed in your
friends, and as a group, you have
supported each other. Have you
ever stopped to consider how
much your power has grown?
Now, you could fell enemies in
Onett and Twoson with one
blow. As you certainly know,
you cannot turn back. Giygas,
the arch fiend of the universe, is
growing frightened of you and
your power. He is searching for
ways to end your journey.

From here, the challenge grows
and your adventure will take you
beyond anything you ever
imagined. You are drawing near
to Giygas. Remember when you
are suffering hardships, your
enemy is also struggling.

By the way, do you know where
Pokey went? When this cup of
tea is finished, your adventure will
continue. Your destiny pulls you
in the right direction. Believe in
yourself and press forward.

Ness!
Paula!
Jeff!
Poo!
I wish you luck...

14. & even if it is written truly, what if you’re not in a place or temporal position to read the thing truly? Because you’ve had a bad day, bad month, bad year. Maybe there’s too much noise between us? What then?

15. Maybe a little to do with hearts.

16. I hunger(ed) for new ways to get lost. Secret places to tuck my bones & genuflect in their sacred, stowaway crevices. Fortunately, books emerged to fill this ravenous gap. Getting lost is still an important part of adulthood, too. We need hypothetical spaces through which to crawl & carve out the canvas of us. Mapless, unformed territories to help us form, imagine, dream our hypothetical selves into being.

17. So much depends upon a signal.

18. Another ultimately abandoned title: Playtime for Grownups: On the Value of Getting Lost.

19. Maybe writing is more like a prayer? Maybe that’s the better metaphor? I imagine some prayers go unanswered. I don’t really know. Who does? Is there ever any receipt? Isn’t that the whole basis of faith: trusting in a receiver in absence of confirmation? That there is a thereness there?

20. Seriously, are you there?                                      Is anybody even out there?

21. & who’s to say the message gets through the way it was intended? What of static, the saboteur of distance? Who’s to say angels aren’t getting their wires crossed? What if it’s all one big game of telephone?

22. For some arbitrary reason, recess as a thing critical to one’s development ceased to exist upon reaching a certain plateau of adulthood. With grownup responsibilities, everything inherited a fine glaze of diminished wonder.

23. Every Thanksgiving during the family prayer I keep my eyes open & there is always that one cousin who also keeps their eyes open & we both smirk like it’s the greatest secret & that’s the story of how we started the Secret Eyes Open During Prayer Club for Cousins.

24. I’m doing it wrong aren’t I?         I knew it!        Eyes have to be closed, don’t they?   It’s like kissing, then?   
Wait, is that why they never went through?

25. I’m lost again aren’t I?                                                     Good.

26. In Mother 3, the sequel to Earthbound released in Japan on Gameboy Advance, if you deign to drink a cup of coffee at a certain time in a certain place, you will be treated to this intermission (full experience here):

No one is simply born “strong.”

People only grow stronger little by little, by
encountering difficult situations and learning
not to run from them, no matter how
frightening or daunting they may be.

Lucas. That is exactly what you
have done to grow strong.

However, you did not do it for yourself.

You grew strong for those you would
otherwise be unable to help. They are the
reason you are strong.

Even now, you occasionally show a glimpse
of it, Lucas. Fleeting images of that
once-pampered, crybaby boy can sometimes
be seen in your smile.

You’ve come a very long way.

There’s no telling what to expect from here
on out, but if one thing is certain, it’s that
those who believe in you will be right there
to help.

Trust in them.

Now go forth, toward whatever stands out
the most in your eyes.

Go, facing not the darkness, but the light.

Lucas…
And his companions…

You have driven the enemy into a corner.
The enemy’s back is to the wall.

There is nothing to fear now.

Everyone is watching on, with complete
faith in you. In their hearts, they all say,
“Thank you!”

Can you hear them?

27. How are you supposed to write about one thing without writing about everything at once?

28. This piece was also called, for a short while, simply: In Search Of.

29. Maybe it all comes down to faith & there’s nothing to soften the gambit? To speak anything into existence means to risk mistranslation. Better to float a wiffleball of meanings flimsily out into the ether, saying “Do with my words what you will, angels” than suffer in silence.

30. SPOILER ALERT: During the final epic battle with Giygas the Cosmic Destroyer at the end of Earthbound, eventually you will find you are powerless. Nothing you can do will hurt Him—no move in your psychic arsenal, no amount of fireworks or upgraded boon nor cracked bat to leave a dent. Only one move, Paula’s ability to pray, is left to elicit a response: when she prays in wild desperation, everyone you’ve helped along your journey hears her. They, in turn, pray back. They sense your collective distress &, like a chain link chorus of cosmic antibodies, rush to your defense with wishful weaponized goodwill. This, in the end, is what saves you. What saves everyone: Karmic Kindness.

31. I have always wondered who is doing the speaking in the Earthbound coffee/tea break sequence. From whom or what is this mysterious benevolent text emanating, reaching out through a careless void to assuage us, encourage us with such fervent kindness & belief in our abilities? Is it the voice of Buzz Buzz, an early ally in the game struck down soon after conveying to our avatar the importance of their fate? Is it the game maker, reaching through the construct of their game to touch the player-participant & say something abruptly sincere? Is it the collective spirit chorus of Mr. Saturn, the first to pray for our heroes during the final boss battle & in whose presence we are first invited to sip tea/coffee & meditate on the meaning of our journey? Is it supposed to be the same voice that Poo hears in the blank slate of his mind while meditating on a mountaintop in Dalaam, while his legs are broken arms taken ears cut off & sight stolen? My favorite theory, though, an unprovable distant possibility: it is our own voice, a future version of ourselves speaking backwards through time, like the one we get after battling the false idol. A future version of ourselves who knows we will make it because we already have, but who also knows how small we once felt. Who knows how much we need to hear it. Or perhaps it is just some disembodied, drug-addled ghost spitting cryptic gibberish: the equivalent of a wrong number left on a cosmic answering machine?

32. SOMEBODY is out there.                                                I can feel it.

33. Write what you feel. How hard a thing that is to do, when the world is constantly trying to tell you what you should be feeling. Write a wild drunken story to tear down the stars. Write one that’s meek, silent as a stone, mild-mannered but sharp like a rising whisper in the throat of a ghost. Carve whatever the hell you want: just make sure it’s yours & don’t let anyone else dictate the loudness of its truth. Keep praying to whatever forever. Just as long as you’re praying to something. A great somethingness instead of a nothingness.

34. I am grateful to books, to Earthbound, to the act of writing for showing me novel ways to get lost without losing myself. For proving an acceptable substitute for an absence of recess.

35. There’s another scene in Earthbound—this one—that occurs upon defeating a literal false idol (it purports to be an evil part of your brain, one you cannot defeat because you forced it into being), where a vision tells you to proceed to Saturn Valley where you will imbibe that fateful drink that will reveal to you your final fate & then you hear your own voice. You level up, wake finally from a long nightmare, & are told: Suddenly, Ness’ mind cleared and he realized that he had possessed great power...     He had.            As in,
finished.                                                                      Complete.

36. Afterward, Ness realizes he *has the power of teleport β*…able now to move through time, space, memory, Ness makes all the hidden powers his own, absorbing the power of the land into his heart until Magicant is no more…

37. What about this: I’ll believe in you if you believe in me?

38. There’s that moment when Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy she could have clicked her heels together & left Oz at any time, but the journey she had to take for herself to arrive at the realization of her own power.     That realization that everything matters. The meaning-making of the thing.

39. Amen.

Matthew Burnside is a writer.

(Excerpts from) A Diviner's Notebook by Hannah Kezema

On the first day I bled in the Finnish woods, I made dolls of the birch twigs I’d dried above the bedroom furnace, wrapping them in yarn. Whether to cross, or wrap, or tie, and whether to cut. A figure slowly emerges in a dress every time. They don’t have faces like Sonya’s dolls. They don’t have faces or eyes or shoes, just wooden splays where I snapped their limbs in two. Barely standing and yet arms raised as if rejoicing, I can almost hear the music they dance to. My hands moved from strings to other strings and I wrote my first song in years, once again immersed in landscape and some twinge of heartache. Thought of calling my family for days but never ready; even with all my questions, I must prepare myself for the inevitable elaborate lies, the fictions of my ancestry. How to weave this together without becoming undone I wonder before I begin to bleed.

It’s true that I grabbed the red thread and yarn days ago with some vague purpose, and it’s true that my first unravelling of the spool, my first wrapping, was red. I sat in front of Ulla Jokisala’s “Learn How to Stand on Your Own Two Feet” and her book splayed open in my lap, the photographs woven with red thread, sometimes letters and sometimes spilling from houses. The process of understanding our lives, or creating, or both.

❧

It’s true that the other day I lost myself in research on the life of Mother Cabrini, a saint, and upon writing down her name, a small bird flew into my window. I rose from my chair to look and there were more birds — in fact, the only birds I had seen from the window yet. “Villagers and members of the family recalled later that just before her birth, a flock of white doves circled around high above the house, and one of them dropped down to nestle in the vines that covered the walls. The father took the bird, showed it to his children, then released it to fly away. [1]”

It’s true that after founding her first orphanage in New York, Mother Cabrini was broke and held needlework classes to earn extra money, as she was well-versed in embroidery. The night of the first blood, I closed the shades as I always did, and when I awoke, opened them again. It’s true that on this morning, to the left of the dolls on the windowsill was a long, loose piece of white yarn. A yarn I hadn’t cut. A yarn I hadn’t used.

❧

 Minerva came to me on the cusp of the new moon in Scorpio, wrapped in black, tied with knots and loose threads. The most frustrating doll to make, I found I suddenly could not remember how to tie the branches together, and I was my most anxious then, at approximately 6:00 p.m., right at the onset of the Dark Moon. My scorpion stung me unexpectedly, and while he had not intended it, I felt the sting for hours, blind to his many messages, him trying to reach me until he was asleep. Our time is almost a day apart now and my night is his day; his day is my dark.

I’ve since learned Minerva is untimely, unseasonable. That she is associated with agriculture, particularly the olive tree, and according to fable was overcome by Neptune, the planet that rules the fish in my sun. That she made a name for Athens and was an incarnation of the Greek goddess Athena.

“Arachne, vain-glorious of her ingenuity, challenges Minerva to a contest of skill in her art. The Goddess accepts the challenge and, being enraged to see herself outdone, strikes her rival with her shuttle; upon which, Arachne, in her distress, hangs herself. Minerva, touched with compassion, transforms her into a spider. [2]”   

❧

 I’ve also since learned that Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, but she was also a patroness of art, music, poetry, weaving, and craft-making, among many other things. She was a warfare strategist who burst from the head of Jupiter, already clad in full armor, and is often depicted with an owl; sometimes, a snake. The owl who can pierce through darkness and intellect—I think of the Ace of Swords rising, penetrating clouds. The Romans believed the owl to be the harbinger of death.

The birds return whenever I’m writing. “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering. [3]”

Endnotes 

1) Vann, Father Joseph. Lives of Saints with Excerpts from Their Writings.
2) Ovid, “Book the Sixth” of “Fable I,” Metamorphosis.
3) G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820), “Preface”; trans. S.W. Dyde, 1896.

Hannah Kezema is an artist who works across mediums. She is the author of the chapbook, three (2017, Tea and Tattered Pages), and her work appears or is forthcoming from Black Sun Lit, Full Stop, Spiral Orb, Emergency Index, Gesture, and other places. She was the 2018 Arteles Resident of the Enter Text program in Haukijärvi, Finland, where she worked on her manuscript, A Diviner’s Notebook, which investigates ancestral absences, divinatory praxis, and female occult figures. Along with Angel Dominguez, she co-founded the performance art collaborative DREAM TIGERS in 2014, which experiments with time, process, and hybrid modes.

The Violets' Creed

Venus beat her rivals blue and purple until they turned into violets.  

Ophelia gave rosemary and pansies to Laertes. She gave fennel and columbine to Claudius. She gave rue to Gertrude. Ophelia gifted violets to no one for they all wilted when her father died.

Gabriel came to Mary and said to her that she would bear the Son of God in her womb; she replied to the angel, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.” Then, beside her, a violet blossomed.

 When Jesus died, the violets beside Mary died.

 In Catholic school, they told me what to believe. I was not taught about violets. There was no history lesson in the origins of flowers and feelings, only the origin of sin. I was taught my body was a sin. As we sat criss-cross applesauce with a Bible in the bowl, we did not know we would all grow up to be different sinners. We did not know we would see each other in our hometown streets of rickety bricks and see the sins in every crease and freckle of each other’s faces. When I cried in Mrs. Shoulberg’s first grade class under the ice blue cubbies, I asked her why I had to fear God. The next year, under those same cubbies with more than backpacks weighing overhead, I asked her who made God.

 Henry was allowed a Catholic funeral. His parents claimed the death was an accident. They separated. I believe in denial.

 There were violets around Ophelia in the river where she drowned. She too was allowed a Christian funeral, her death ruled accidental. Violets did not rest around Henry at the funeral, though. Or perhaps they did, inside the closed casket, upon his pale skin.

 In Catholic school often times they recited little metaphors from the gospel to us. We are the sheep and he is the shepherd. We are the clay and he is the potter. We are the vine and he is the branches.

 Sow the seed of Christ.

Use this in a sentence: Joseph sowed the seed of Christ right into Mary’s cervix? No . . . 

James sowed the seed of Christ right into Mary-Elizabeth’s cervix on top of that dorm room bunk bed.

I read somewhere if you put each seed in your mouth before you plant it, when it grows you will have a deeper connection to the plant. So I kissed each violet seed so softly with the insides of my cheeks before plunging them into the soil nestled between terracotta walls. My DNA is their warm blanket.  

I once read a book by Tom Robbins called Still Life with Woodpecker. It became my under-the-pillow book. It became my give-to-your-lover book. I read this book, and now I believe in the moon and I believe in lunaception and I am still foggy on whether love can stay.

If Mary-Elizabeth’s menstruation had been synced to the moon, maybe she would not have been on my floor drinking the tea she asked me to make for her that warm June night. Blue Cohosh. Mugwort. Parsley. Cinnamon. She miscarried. Blood stained her yellow dress. I believe that love will stay, the love she had for her baby. It will stay a seed in her cervix and grow out her throat into a tender violet.

My grandfather used to send me in the mail once a week a VHS of The Muppet Show. Debbie Harry and Harry Belafonte raised me. I could mouth every line. I used to sing “The Rainbow Connection” with my mom while she sewed me into sun-faded quilts. My grandfather taught me how to fish. He was not very good at fishing, but he fished for the quiet. And by that standard, he was excellent. He took me to church, and when we went, he did not sing or say the creed aloud. He went to church for the quiet. He was the kind of man dogs chose to sit by. He was the kind of man who believed in God. He was the kind of poor boy who married the rebellious rich girl, the stereotype. He was the kind of man who gave her everything he had. He was the kind of man who served his country. He was the kind of man who had three daughters and gave them everything he had. He was the kind of man who was a banker instead of an artist. I say was because he was the kind of God-fearing man who got Alzheimer's. Now he is not much of anything. I believe it is not easy being green.

Or made up of skin. Or petals.

When your best friend tells you she is going to get clean in Oakland, do you let her? Do you believe in her? I believe it is not easy loving addicts.

She came to the midwest from the New Jersey suburbs. The state flower of New Jersey is the violet.

At coffee shops she gives the baristas her middle name. Always. Violet.

Henry shut the door to his Volvo station wagon. We’d sat in the backseat of that Volvo. We would steal all sorts of things we did not need and Henry could afford, and that would be our getaway car. We would sing The Strokes in that Volvo because we loved The Strokes because he loved The Strokes and when Henry loved something dammit you loved it too. He did not touch lives; that is too soft. He collided into them. He impacted them. Henry shut the door to his Volvo station wagon and walked onto Kansas Highway 10. His body collided with a 1999 Chevy Malibu. 

When I get a call from her and she is screaming, I go to her. We are impermanent people.

I see Henry’s dad driving that silver Volvo with all the bumper stickers unscraped and the cassettes probably still scattered on the passenger side floor. I know why she would take a handful of pills. Violets and Volvos are permanent things.

When I get a call from her and she says it's time to go get tattoos, I go with her. I sat in that dirty tattoo parlor for her. I let that washed up punk put the needle in my arm and in hers because it's a hell of a lot better than other needles. I will look at that tattoo every day on my arm and know it is on hers too. I will believe in permanence. And impermanence.

Today’s incantation is balance.

Or purity. Not purity like chastity. Purity like a violet in a throat. Pollen on the legs of bees. A high priestess, the moon, and all her stars. Sin. Dancing in your underwear with a bottle of tequila. Kermit the frog. Falling in love for the first time. Or the second.

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection / The lovers, the dreamers, and me / All of us under its spell / We know that it’s probably magic.

No one told me about falling in love for the second time. No one told me I would stop trusting my body. No one told me I would see scars when I looked down at my skin, but when my partner looked at my skin, he would just see skin. No one told me about ghosts inside my body or that I would stop trusting my head or how a body can feel like a sin again. No one told me learning to trust stung old wounds like Bactine on scraped knees or church wine in a young throat. I believe love can hurt.

I believe in beliefs as found objects and loves as found objects too. I believe love can grow out of loss. Maybe it has to. That is okay. It is hard for seeds to break the surface of the soil. And that is okay. I believe the ghosts will go find new homes or maybe skin can learn to live with ghosts. Maybe skin has to learn to live with ghosts. Symbiosis.

Today’s incantation is symbiosis.

Or healing. As in Dirty Dancing as the best post-breakup, pre-breakup, or any point in time medicine. As in forgiving your partner for scars they did not make. As in forgiving yourself for scars you did not make. Baptism. Going into the woods and offering it blackberries and mugwort. A sea of butterflies. Driving your dead son’s Volvo. Sending prayers to Oakland. Watching the wound on your thigh scab over and then picking at the damn scab. I believe in scabs.

I bought a rainbow maker for my window. This is what coping with loss looks like. Express shipping.

But can I priority ship a prayer? If Dirty Dancing can heal a breakup, can it heal an addiction? I could express ship a VHS copy of that to Oakland. Is addiction a picked off scab?

Use reconciliation in a sentence: I don’t forgive you for wanting to die. When God closes a casket, we have to grab a crowbar to open a window just to get away from the smell of rotting violets on top of rotting flesh. Drink this in memory of me, or don’t. Go to an AA meeting.

At Jim Henson’s memorial at St. John’s cathedral in New York, thousands of grieving people held tiny butterfly muppets. Their little wings flapped in the air. The sea of butterflies sang “The Rainbow Connection.” Everything was irrevocably human and healing. I need to know if there were violets on his throat.

I always hated church. I hated holding hands and reciting “The Apostle’s Creed.” I never knew the words. I just mouthed them. I did know one line: I believe in the forgiveness of sins.

My church is my body now. I hold hands with people I love and have loved. I know the words to my creed.

I believe in the inbetweens: hands dyed pink from beets, rotten fruit in the basket, dirt under fingernails, dead armadillos, new cotton sheets, film negatives, chamomile baths I fall asleep in, skin flakes peeled off my foot, thrift store champagne coupes, and curried potatoes. I believe typewriters don’t die, their souls just inhabit another place. People too. I believe in eggs any style. Except egg whites. Fuck egg whites. I believe in the medicinal benefits of Dirty Dancing. I believe in Patrick Swayze. I believe in death. I believe in heartbreak. I believe turmeric reverses Alzheimer's, because I have to. I believe a book can change the world or at least my world. I believe love can go, but it can also stay put. I believe love can be told to sit, stay, lay, and roll over, and I believe love will never listen. I believe in divorce. I believe my African violets will grow even though I used the wrong potting soil. I believe in mugwort, magic, and tarot cards. But I also don’t. I believe in you and me more than tarot cards. I believe in losing earrings, childhood, and people. I believe in finding love inside coat pockets and on twin mattresses. I believe in getting clean or at least washing up. I believe in lasting, withstanding.  I believe in the lovers, the dreamers, and me.

Amen.

Sophia Blue Coen is a creative non-fiction writer from Lawrence, Kansas. She studies English education and creative writing at the University of Kansas. Her work blends the magical brightness of childhood with the present. Coen strives to navigate the concept of modern mythology in her work by bending genre and playing with form.

An Interview with Lisa Marie Basile

Grimoire Issue IV poetry contributor Lisa Marie Basile is a poet, essayist and editor living in NYC. She's the founding editor-in- chief of Luna Luna Magazine, an online magazine & community dedicated to literature, witchcraft and ideas.

She is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry, including Apocryphal, war/lock, Triste, and Andalucia.  Her book Nympholepsy (co-authored with Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein) will be published by Inside the Castle in November 2018. It was a finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards.  She is also working on her first novella, to be released by Clash Books in 2019. Her work can also be found in The New York Times, Narratively, Entropy, Bust, The Establishment, and more. Her work has been nominated for the Best American Experimental Writing anthology and for several Pushcart Prizes, and has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2015. 

We caught up with Lisa recently to celebrate the publication of her first nonfiction book, Light Magic for Dark Times, which was published by Quarto Books in September 2018. 

How did this book come to be? What was your process in putting it together and deciding on its structure? 

Thanks for taking the time to chat with me, lovely Grimoire editors! 

So, the book was a bit kismet, really: Last year, several people I love died. I didn’t know how to cope. Around the same time, I was also diagnosed officially with a spinal disease, which doctors suspected for about a decade. I still cannot believe it, really.

I threw myself into ritual and intentional living—just intuitively, delicately, as I withdrew, trying to find a way to manage it all. I don’t believe in God in the traditional sense, but I do believe in connecting with nature and energy (to me, this is magic) and that magic suddenly felt even more real to me, even more than when I was younger and studying it. The water, the earth, a candle, the time I’d spend alone—it all felt really alive, animated, spirited, and like it was there for me. I began writing rituals around this time (and putting them up at Luna Luna). An editor approached me after reading my rituals and some other essays I’d done, and asked if I’d want to explore a full book of self-care practices, pooling together my interest in both magic and trauma recovery.

While writing it, I looked back on my days as a teen in homeless shelters and foster care…tinkering with spells, and reading about magic, often because I felt a lack of empowerment. I wanted to create a loving book to support people in moments of vulnerability. I wanted to make a grimoire that could balance—and lean into—both light and dark. 

I initially wasn’t sure if I was emotionally grounded enough to write a book—I mean, who is?—but I did it, and it saved me.

In terms of the logistics, I created a survey asking people who practiced magic what they’d want (or not want) in a book. I asked friends what sort of spells they’d fantasized about. I studied what I liked about other books, and I examined the language around self-care practices that were geared to privileged folks. I wanted to offer something accessible and different, something friendly and hopeful. I have lots of people—witches and non-witches alike—to thank for inspiration.

In the book you write, “The words we write are magical. Language has always been at the core of spellcraft.” As writers, of course we’re deeply invested in the power of language, and we were moved by your articulation of its centrality to witchcraft. How has your spellcraft practice influenced your writing, and vice versa?

For a long time, I don’t think I realized that I was actively practicing magic. I have always been interested in it and have practiced it throughout the years, but even when my connection to spirituality slipped away, I always returned to writing: journaling, making lists, scribbling little wishes onto scrolls which I’d hide or carry or bury or place at an altar of sorts (something my Sicilian grandmother did and I picked up on).

I was writing poetry in such a way that I felt it was conjuring something or releasing something. I wrote one of my book as a spell (war/lock) and another (Apocryphal) as a eulogy. They were all intentional. When I read the poems aloud it felt like a casting or incantation. I don’t think I realized how natural and magical that was until about five years ago. Now it’s all one for me. Magic and language and poetry and the electric space between the lines.

To you, what is a spell? 

It’s an action with an intention behind it—it can be in a breath, a movement, a word, a sound, anything. It draws on some energy—of self, of nature, of whatever you’re feeding it with. It’s autonomy.

We love your emphasis in the book on magic and ritual as a form of play, which is something so much literature about creativity in the arts is about. Could you say more about this link between play and creativity, both in witchcraft and in art?

Thank you! Of course all writing and creation has an element of work to it. It’s not always just a moment of muse and magic. But sometimes, when we’re doing serious work—whether it’s writing a poem or casting a spell—it can be really fun to just go outside the lines. Fuck lineation up. Abandon genre. Decide green is your favorite color when it comes to love spells. Decide to rewrite what power objects you use, despite what associations tell us. Decide to do off-the-cuff spellwork, without anything but your gut. Improvising healing.

 As someone who has read a lot of grimoires, I really enjoyed the openness of this book. I especially appreciated your insistence that one doesn’t have to have expensive or rare materials to practice, and that creating your own path and improvising with what you already have and feels good to you is completely valid. Could you say more about why this emphasis on openness and accessibility is important to you?

 People have been doing simple nature, kitchen, and household magic for a long time—many of them to manage systemic oppression and poverty and erasure. I wanted to honor that, in part.

When I was kid, I got my first witchcraft book, by Silver Ravenwolf, at Mandee’s Clothing Store, haha (up until then I could only really borrow books from the library). My mom didn’t have any money, and that book was a splurge for her. I think on all the people who want to connect with nature, or who feel that intrinsic pull to magic, but feel discouraged by the perceived difficulty or price of things: candles in certain colors, herbs that you can’t find.

There is a time and place for more ceremonial and elaborate magic with those materials, and I respect it, but I think self-care and self-healing is already too steeped in privilege. For people who can’t afford therapy and fancy tools, there should be options. A magical lifestyle is not impossible.

 This is NOT “lite,” “lazy,” or “half-assed” either. The heart of it is intent, not expensive goblets and crystals.

You’ve written so meaningfully about trauma in your own life, and how magical practice has helped you heal. The very title of the book (“for dark times”) points towards the healing and protective qualities of ritual. We think that’s how so many people come to witchcraft and the figure of the witch, particularly, as you point out, those who have been pushed to the margins by society. Could you say more about that? 

 I think being watching my parents suffer from the illness of addiction really pushed me to find an inner source of power. I was surrounded by powerlessness and the ground was always dropping out from under us. My grandparents were Catholic, but even in Catholic school, my young mind—like many young minds—was malleable and in tune, and I just felt like organized religion wasn’t listening to my voice. I felt, if anything, like my pain and worry was something I wanted to control—rather than entrusting it to a divine source with a predetermined path.

 Coming to magic was like that Tori Amos song, “Silent All These Years.” I discovered that I could build a set of actions that made me feel good and empowered. I remember, in my teens, lighting a candle before bed, and writing a little wish on a tiny piece of paper, staring into that candle, and focusing so hard on it coming true. Almost all of my wishes came true. I did this for years, and for a long time it was just natural—I didn’t consider myself a witch or a practitioner of anything, really.

People who are marginalized and systemically oppressed, from what I’ve experienced, align with the witch’s rebelliousness, her connection to nature—something we ALL have access to—and her iteration across cultures and times.  There is always a witch to feel at home with.

Why do you think more and more people are turning to witchcraft at this historical moment?

I think part of the reason is that we are deconstructing the binary of this versus that, good versus bad, sacred versus profane, and looking at things in a more liminal, nuanced way. The witch straddles all of these lines, and she’s a powerful archetype of transformation, nature, and self-truth. It helps that so many people are writing about her, and destigmatizing her.

In addition to writing, you also edit Luna Luna Magazine and have a very active online presence. How do you think the age of the internet, in particular social media, has influenced growing interest in witchcraft in this particular moment?

 There is the “aesthetic” witch, which is the image/iconography of the witch that we see all the time—and I think, even if it’s more about the look versus the act, it’s reminding people that we can design a life for ourself using power objects and archetypes and creativity.

Then there’s the fact that so many people can come together and bond over their interest in the witch. There are whole communities. Luna Luna is one such community, but there are lots more!

I am so grateful to all the people who create a dialogue not just around witchcraft but around self-care and empowerment. This cross-section is what my book is all about, and it’s given me so much peace.

Please join Luna Luna’s community-coven on Facebook and check us out here: lunalunamagazine.com <3

What has the response been to the book so far? 

The book has been met with SO much love! I’ve also found that’s a very Instagrammable book, ha! I’m still totally in shock, and feeling the impostor syndrome pretty hard. People are recognizing its balance of light and dark, which was important to me—because I came to it holding light in one hand and darkness in the other. I believe that liminality holds answers. I’m just so thankful and hope people use it as a tool for wellness.

 What future projects are on the horizon?  

My next book, Nympholepsy, is coming out this fall. It’s a book of poems co-written with poet Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein! Other than that, I’m working a lot on Luna Luna and developing & launching an online course about writing & journaling magic for healing and manifestation.

 Thank you!

There Were Signs by Anne Barngrover

You are trained to look for stories.

For years you’ve told your students, setting means both place and time. You often forget the second part, the part about time. The year becomes 2017. Seventy jobs have rejected you— seventeen? You learn to round your mouth, to speak more clearly. No, sev-en-ty. The president pushes his hand onto a book and performs bad alchemy, where a gasp becomes a scream.

You tell your students, if you want to be a writer, you must enter the world in a new way. You must see what others don’t, hear what others don’t, smell and touch and taste. Notes of salt and rot on the air. Black fruit crushed to red; red fruit crushed to black. White ibises draped in a slash pine, those gangly ornaments. Lightbulbs sing. Keyholes swell. Become a cat before a thunderstorm hits, your ears perked, tail a switch, belly low to the ground. Feel yourself sizzle, hiss, snap.

 One morning you feel an ache between your breasts, a knuckle that punishes and kneads. It’s because I ran too hard yesterday, you think, but it’s deeper than that, the start of wings in reverse.

It’s the way you sleep, your body a violence, clenching everything. It’s your heart chakra, the unhurt that flexes from sternum to throat, either too strong or too weak.

It’s your anxious girl body still kicking inside. Haven’t you always been a sloucher, shoulders hunched forward? In junior high you hurried through teeming halls, trying to make it across the building before each bell rang. Backpack over ten percent of your body weight. You were ashamed of your height and wanted to slide like a lizard along the lockered walls. There was never enough time to pee, so you gave yourself a UTI. Time became pain, a kind of fire. Your doctor wrote a note: Sometimes it’s ok not to show up on time.

A finger points to your breastbone: That’s where the wind gets knocked out of you. That’s where the grief resides.

 This is not the beginning of the story, but it’s not a story that begins.

Another morning, in 2017: a headache glitters, a stick of rock candy behind your brows. It hurts to look up and apply mascara. Then it hurts every morning; it always hurts to look up. When you wash your face, eyelashes fall out like dandelion seeds.

Hips ache. It’s the rainy season, pressure building until a thousand windows break, a tantrum of glass. A ghost flutters in your wrists, but it’s not the same as when you took too many notes in school. Hair doesn’t look gray but feels gray, brittle and thin. It dresses the carpet in dry webs, bright only with static electricity. It’s not the color that has changed as the way it moves in light. Your friend D. used to say you were a phoenix. Ash, fire, bird. You’ve reverted: bird, fire, ash.

I’m getting old, you reason, but you’re only thirty-one. You turned thirty in a South Beach nightclub, green lasers a seizure behind your eyes. You could have been sleeping but you were dancing. Maybe you were the wind knocked out. On the beach gulls attacked abandoned bags of Tostitos and you begged your friends, Let’s talk about anything besides my life.

You turned thirty-one unemployed, rejected by a hundred jobs. Your therapist advised you to practice gratitude. She said, In my professional opinion, Clinton and Trump are pretty much the same.

Here’s a new rule for your brain: If it goes away in three days, you won’t think about it. If it stays longer than three days, you won’t think about it either.

You tell your students, watch your gerunds. –Ing verbs slow down the urgency. Things can get stuck. You don’t like the way it sounds: -ing, -ing, -ing. Muddled as your thoughts have become—mixing up dates, forgetting words, misplacing pens and keys, reciting to yourself, You are an I, like that Elizabeth Bishop poem “In the Waiting Room”:

I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world
into cold, blue-black space.

In college, you think—you’re more than certain, you know—you got roofied at a party. One Natty Lite and you were floating above your body, the people around you a greasy throng, Solo cups dark as fish mouths. Your hand closed on C.’s wrist, and you muscled a path outside to lie down in the grass until your body fit back inside your body again. A week later, flyers taped on doors about a party in that building. Warning signs for a non-linear time.

Looking at a palm tree with yellow fronds and thinking, My stomach hurts every day. But it’s not your stomach; it’s your back, it’s your throat. Reaching for coffee and not seeing the tremor along your painted nails. Don’t they break more easily now? You choked during R.’s wedding, unable to read the Rumi poem you’d practiced for days. Held your breath because you already couldn’t breathe. Never heard the vows. You spoke to the other bridesmaid with your eyes, and she read the poem instead. Some people noticed; others said, It went off without a hitch.

It went off.

Drunk and gazing out the window of a Lyft, saying out loud, The half-moon here is horizontal, but it used to be vertical before. The Lyft driver knowing what you’re talking about, his words unfurling like thick smoke from cheap candles. Wait, wait. The Notes on your phone filling up with fragments and run-ons.

Not remembering why the moon is different. Not remembering what he said.

You tell your students, a metaphor is stronger than a simile. Fireflies of rust blink in your underwear, ticking their clocks that count down to what, you don’t know. This happens to girls like you: unruly, off-schedule. Your body’s cycles have been manufactured for fourteen years. Nothing went right as a teenager; you started too late and then with a vengeance, cramps radiating like a force field, careening like a blacked-out star. 

No, that’s not right: You were the force field. You were the blacked-out star.

You tell your students, if you want to be a writer, push through and don’t complain. Push till you get the degree, the book deal, The Big Job. Numb yourself to rejection, to the point you don’t feel sad anymore—

(You don’t feel anything at all.)

You are on a run, on the run—does it matter? You tell yourself, just a little while longer. You’ll feel good, the endorphins will flood you, you’ll be proud of yourself once you finish. But you finish, and you don’t feel proud. You’ll have to start all over again tomorrow; you won’t want to do it, and you won’t be any better. How you long to float past the cornfield, the river, the pop-up Christmas tree farm, out onto the highway, and lie down.

You fall asleep on the couch after a shower, hair damp on the cushions, still sweating from your lower back and scalp. Your whole life, you’ve been an insomniac, sleep a skeletal merchant who stalked the bedroom corners. But now you marvel at how easily you succumb, how sleep has always been plush and fecund, a hypnotic swamp with arms of muck and algae reaching out to suffocate you and pull you under.

Ten hours, twelve hours, fourteen. What if setting is only time?

 Since your health insurance keeps changing, you have to find new doctors. You understand, most people go to a doctor’s office thinking they don’t belong: This place is for sick people, but I am well. You think the opposite: This place is for normal people, but something is wrong with me.

Posters of babies in knitted vegetable hats. Nurses with clear skin and rose-gold engagement rings. They nod. White Coat Syndrome. Six out of ten patients that we see. Doctors sigh. I get stressed out, too, sometimes. Checklists for who you live with, whom they can call. They will ask too many questions, see your life curled as a snail. They will see how alone you really are.

Blood pressure too high and heartrate skyrocketing. Did you run here? You pop an Advil, a tide pool in your palm. Nothing makes your thighs stop shaking, your pulse quiet to a thrum.

You never used to be this way. So, what, you turned thirty and suddenly everything’s a fireball? Are your thoughts a meaningless spiral, or are they trying to tell you something?

 Listen.

To what? What is your body? What is your mind? How do you know how to read the signs if you don’t know what are the signs?

An art museum, an exhibit of taxidermied animals. A fawn enters a twinkling orange tent, a splendor of nylon threads and spinning seeds. You envy the little deer—the cotton in its eyes, how it faces a mist shapeless as a dream, its back forever turned on the white walls the artist never wanted it to see.

In the next room, a blackbird drops like a stone. R. leans in and blinks: You don’t look alright, you know.

You are “looking for something, something, something.” That’s what Elizabeth Bishop writes in “The Sandpiper,” another poem. She examines the world from every side, every angle. “Poor bird, he is obsessed!”

Maybe this looking needs to end.

You tell your students, adverbs and adjectives are pennies and nickels. Use sparingly. Nouns and verbs are one-dollar bills. Make them work for you.

Is this what it’s like? You un-noun. You un-verb. Boneless, you sluice into dependent clauses and prepositional phrases, the melodramas of TV shows you’ve watched a dozen times. Slot yourself into fictional characters who will live for you. It’s too hard to write your own story. You’ve grown too tired. You accept without tears: You will never travel again. You will never have children. You will not grow old, for you already are old. Your life has passed you by, and you are grateful. It was a good one, wasn’t it, at one time?

You do not speak of this. Your non-life is your secret, a letter folded unto itself until it offers dimension. It weighs something now.

And then, suddenly, you do it: one day, you land The Big Job. Only 149 tries to get there. To be a writer, to teach students how to write, but this time for a living wage. After you move again, you have to see Dr. P., a gynecologist. You don’t know why, but this time, you are not so afraid. She seems nice, young, calm. She doesn’t ask who else lives in your home.

Something wills you to open your mouth and share part of what’s going on. You only tell her about the spotting and how your cramps have gotten worse, how they seem to come from someplace deeper, like something has taken root inside you and won’t be shaken free.

But I’m sure I’m just stressed out. There’s been a lot going on for me. 

Can she hear how your words echo through a thousand chambers? Can she see how you’re not a you anymore?

A simple blood test. No one else did it. They prescribed an anti-depressant, little quarry in your palm. They told you to meditate, run, be grateful; they told you Clinton and Trump were pretty much the same. Let’s test your thyroid. You are scared, but something about Dr. P. makes you feel it’ll be ok.

Wings at the base of your throat. You used to be so crisp in your mind. Your hair flared a thick ponytail, lush and gold. You’d ask for sex three times in a row. You traveled far. Your favorite books were the ones with a map on the first page: an adventure to reveal. It was how you saw your own life. 

The blood test comes back. It isn’t ok. Somehow, you’ve always known.

Sometimes folded letters are folded wings. Sometimes wings have eyes.

The wings in your throat have gone limp, crushed from the inside. Your own immune system has attacked them for years: something in your birth chart, your fate, your genetic code. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis—it was predestined for you. Grandmother with an autoimmune. She died when you were in high school. Uncle with an autoimmune. Different kinds, but they travel together in clusters. Like fish, wolves, or stars. The one you have, it usually hits the girls.

 No one cared to look.

You thought it was the president. You thought it was the academic job market. You thought it was being an introvert. You thought everyone was depressed. You thought everyone was tired. You thought it was being a writer.

 (Write it! Like disaster.)

 There is no cure for what you have. It will be with you forever. You are cursed, but it is not the worst one. There are things they can do to help. Your diseased thyroid is a bucket of water with a hole in the bottom, and the hormone they give you is a hose that dumps in water. You can add more or less water, but there will always be that hole.

So you’ll take a pill every morning for the rest of your life. Little ocean in your palm, changing colors, a new kind of tide. You’ll get blood tests every few months. Other symptoms can be monitored. Your endocrinologist, Dr. G., listens to you, and your body begins to respond. In six weeks, the muscle aches fade. A few weeks later, you lift your arms and someone pulls off the lead apron of fatigue, places it beside you on the ground. One day you reach for coffee with a steady hand.

Doctors recognize your face in the lab, pharmacists your voice over the phone. What cured you from fearing you had a disease—getting diagnosed with a goddamn disease. All along, it was the unknown.

 All along, it was being a girl. You thought this was a woman’s life: bleed too much, so you cross your legs. Legs too long, so you slump into something smaller. Shy heart too open, so you screw it shut for good. The world only wanted you to work: One more try, one more. To welcome your exhaustion. Dull your luster and verve. Forget your words; whatever you had to say, no one wanted to hear. It was better if you were ill—one less woman speaking, one less woman making sound.

The president loved your illness. He never wanted you to get well.

This is not the end of the story, but it’s not a story that ends.  

Run through the rainy season: green clouds crackling with negative ions, the pressure of a thousand sealed letters. Finish and start again.

You must enter the world in a new way. A puddle can become a compass. A river, a weathervane. The end of an island is also its beginning: an overlay of sand, convergence of salt and waves. It had been waiting for you, the map with all its muddy terrain. It was just a piece of paper. Nothing to read out loud. 

You’ll learn again about the moon. Dare to say it: Wasn’t it always yours?

Anne Barngrover's second book of poetry, Brazen Creature, was recently published with University of Akron Press. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is on faculty in the low-residency MA program in Creative Writing, and lives in Tampa, Florida. Visit her online at annebarngrover.com. 

An Interview with Pam Grossman

Pam Grossman is a writer, curator, and teacher of magical practice and history. She is the host of The Witch Wave podcast and the author of Waking the Witch (Gallery Books, 2019) and the illuminated manifesto, What Is A Witch (Tin Can Forest Press). You might also be familiar with Pam from her many group art shows and projects, including Language of the Birds: Occult and Art at NYU’s 80WSE Gallery. She has maintained Phantasmaphile, a blog that specializes in art with an esoteric or fantastical bent, since 2005, and in 2017, she launched WitchEmoji, a witch-themed sticker pack for iMessage that became the #1 seller in the App Store. She is also the co-organizer of the biennial Occult Humanities Conference at NYU. Her projects have been featured by such outlets as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, New York Magazine, and Teen Vogue. Grimoire Magazine recently caught up with Pam to discuss what makes the figure of the witch so potent at this moment in history, why academia needs to open up to the occult, and which drag queens are her favorites, among other topics.

Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us! To start off, we would love to know: what first led you to your interest in witchcraft and the occult? What influences or experiences took you down this path?

Thank you for asking me!

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved anything to do with magic. I used to do my own intuitive rituals in the woods behind my house when I was little, and I always gravitated towards stories and toys that had anything to do with mythology and fantastical creatures. From that foundational point, my interests evolved and deepened. I starting doing spells as a teen using books I found at new age shops and mall book stores, and then my own spiritual path as a witch grew from there. Eventually I discovered the writings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and came to realize that no matter our outward differences, the human longing for transformation, ritual, and consciousness expansion is universal.

I studied anthropology, religion, and art history at NYU where I encountered a whole host of thinkers and creators who helped me contextualize my own lifelong search for the divine feminine, for Spirit, and for finding meaning as an energetic being in a female body. Throughout this, my own practice continued in a solitary manner. But after I graduated, I began studying with a green witch named Robin Rose Bennett for several years, and that led me to more of a community, and furthered my journey down the path in a more public way. Meeting a great teacher and having that coven experience enriched and emboldened me.

I've also always loved art made by powerful, imaginative women: from painters like Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, to musicians like Tori Amos and Bjork, to writers like Diane di Prima and Monica Furlong. I consider a lot of these creators to be witches, too, and part of my spiritual lineage. Magic is creative process, and the witch is a creator of metamorphic experiences. These artists helped shape my identity as a witch as much as anything. 

A huge surge of interest in witches has been permeating our culture as of late, and the figure of the witch has proven to be particularly meaningful as a symbol of resistance in the Trump era. What do you think it is about the witch that makes her such a powerful feminist icon, and why do you think we are drawn back to her now? Where do you see witchcraft going in the future?

 Right now, we're seeing an uptick in the embrace of the dark feminine overall. As with the phrase "nasty woman" being reclaimed and resignified by feminists of all stripes, the word "witch" is now being worn as a badge of pride. Witches are change-makers. They're transgressive beings who dwell on the fringes of society, and so they're the perfect icon for rebels, outsiders, and rabble-rousers, especially those of the female persuasion.

Women are tired of being told we have to be bright, happy, pretty, and pleasing all the time, while still being paid less and given less autonomy over our bodies and lives. By embracing our dark aspects, we are rejecting the paradigm of "perfection" and oppression that centuries of history have calcified in our collective psyche. 

Most significantly, the witch is the antithesis of patriarchal structures. She represents an alternative way of being across so many systems. She is comfortable being solitary, but she also works beautifully in community via a coven or other democratic gathering. She honors the Earth and cycles of nature. She has direct access to the divine, and she doesn’t need a mediator or to follow any one book or dogma. She is intuitive, imaginative, and independent. She is a figure of freedom. And so she is who we need right now, and who we need to be.

I think this movement is only going to grow and deepen. Whether metaphorically or literally speaking, I sincerely believe that witches are the future.

A lot of your work — from your excellent witchy website Phantasmaphile [which we saw just celebrated its 12th anniversary — congratulations!] to your new podcast Witch Wave and the magical Witch Emojis you produced — has taken advantage of new digital mediums to explore very old traditions. What are your thoughts about the intersections of witchcraft and technology/online life happening at this moment? What draws you to digital mediums?   

I love that the witch community is thriving and expanding digitally. We all know the Internet’s drawbacks — of which there are many. But at its best, it helps us find kindred spirits, some of whom we can actually meet and collaborate with, both on- and offline. It helps people learn and share information, and in the witchcraft community at least, it helps people feel sparked to be more themselves.

Being interested in alternative spiritual practices, especially witchcraft, can be a really isolating experience in lots of places around the world, and the Internet really helps people feel less alone and less fearful about being themselves. And that is such a beautiful and important thing.

Social media is also one of the few places where women’s voices have equal weight — if not more weight — than men’s. Most media companies are still owned and driven by hetero white dudes. But stats show that more women than men use the image-based social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook and Tumblr. And that means we can actually talk about and celebrate things we care about without any constraints. So I think it’s no surprise that the interest in witches is thriving online, because even though people of all genders can be witches, this archetype is directly tied to feminine power. And now we finally have a place to share these predilections and beliefs without apology.

As to its importance to me personally, it probably goes without saying, but so many of the projects I’ve done have been created with, and consumed by, people I’m connected to online. The Internet has allowed me to find amazing collaborators and a joyfully devoted audience. And for that I’m immensely grateful.

As people with academic backgrounds ourselves, we are also very interested in (and sad we missed out on this year’s!) Occult Humanities Conference you hosted with the NYU Steinhardt Department of Art and Art Professions. It’s great to see research and scholarship on the occult being promoted. Could you speak to the development of this conference and your goals for it?

This is a conference I’ve been doing with my friend, Jesse Bransford, since 2013, on a roughly biennial schedule. Jesse is an incredible occult artist, scholar, and the chair of NYU’s undergrad fine art department, so I’m very lucky that he has been as excited about doing this conference as I have.

Though it’s starting to change a bit, traditionally speaking, academia has not been kind to occult interests. I remember learning about the abstract art movement in school, for example, and there being no mention of magic, mysticism, Theosophy, nothing! And that’s just factually inaccurate, as so many of the canonical abstract artists we think of, from Kandinsky to Pollack to Rothko and onward, were explicitly trying to give the viewer an occult, transformational experience with their work.

It’s astonishing, really, that so many institutions feel at best embarrassed, or at worst threatened, by this content, because the history of the world is steeped in magical ideas. Whether or not you ascribe to them yourself, it still has to be acknowledged that many people have had beliefs in or about magic for thousands of years, and this has shaped our politics, our culture, and our society at every strata. So Jesse and I wanted to create a space where we got leading scholars and artists to explore the relationship between magic and the humanities within an academic context. It’s an eclectic and diverse lineup of speakers each year, but there always manages to be surprising and illuminating links that form between the various lectures and artworks.

So the conference is both a celebration and a reclamation of these principals. Not to mention, it becomes a wonderful Temporary Autonomous Zone where some of the most curious, lovely, likeminded people can come together for three days. A lot of people say that even though they adore the lectures, meeting each other is their favorite part of the whole thing. Getting to commune out in the open, and in an academic setting, is validating and healing in many respects. It helps dissolve the shame around this material and turn it into a vehicle of love and genuine connection. And that’s the most important thing of all.

We have heard you are writing a new full-length book, and we are really excited about it! Can you tell us a bit about it, and any other future projects you’re working on right now?

My book is called Waking the Witch, and it’s a work of creative non-fiction, wherein I explore different aspects of the witch archetype. It’s part historical, and part analytical about why witches are on the rise right now. But it’s also very personal, as I weave in what the witch has meant to me throughout my life and why she matters.

It’s coming out next year from Simon and Schuster’s Gallery Books imprint. I’m very excited about it, but also very much in the weeds of writing it right now, which is inevitably a challenge. So I gratefully welcome any and all good vibes!

I’ve got lots of other projects cooking in the cauldron, too, including writing the text for a new major arcana tarot set from Sabat Magazine, doing other writing for various mediums, making more episodes of my podcast, The Witch Wave, and a few other things I can’t mention quite yet.

If you were going to compile a list of Essential Texts for a Budding Witch in the Trump Era, what books/sites/films/art/etc. would be on the list, and why?

Goodness gracious, that’s something I could probably write 50 pages on alone! There are so many amazing works out there. I’ll stick to a couple very recent ones for now.

Books – Non-fiction: Craft by Gabriela Herstik or Witches, Sluts, Feminists by Kristen Sollée

Books – Fiction: We Were Witches by Ariel Gore or Black Magick by Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott

Sites: The Hoodwitch or HausWitch

Film: Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Anna Biller’s The Love Witch are both pretty fantastic —  though they are horror films, so certainly not instructional!

Music: Lykanthea’s Migration (she wrote the theme song I use for The Witch Wave, and her music is utterly bewitching) or Larkin Grimm’s Chasing an Illusion.

Favorite Queens: Louisianna Purchase, Sasha Velour, and Kim Chi

Finally, just for fun — we noticed that you are a big fan of RuPaul’s Drag Race, as are we! Who are your favorite queens?

I love drag so much. It’s its own sort of witchcraft: it uses glamour as a spell, and it plays with illusion to reveal higher truth. Seriously, there are so many parallels between drag queens and witches as shape-shifters, transformers, and freedom fighters who make magic in the margins…I could talk about this all day!

In fact, my very favorite queen is actually someone who will be my next guest on The Witch Wave: Louisianna Purchase. She’s a witch queen based in Austin, and her approach to drag is magical, artful, and sophisticated, while still having a wicked sense of humor.

In terms of Drag Race queens, there are so many I adore. But my favorites include Sasha Velour, Sharon Needles, Raja, Kim Chi, Katya, BenDeLaCreme, and of course, Ru herself. RuPaul is seriously a transcendent being, and as far as I’m concerned, she’s the ultimate witch!

Smol Talks by Rhiannon Conley

On Mushrooms

It occurs to me I don’t know much about mushrooms. I know that on my plate they are grey-brown and wet like a porpoise, sometimes with a soft inside that is white like an old bone. I know that in my imagination and on doodles in a school girl’s textbook they are red and mottled, as cheery as they are ribbed, and gnomes sit atop them, smoking. Sometimes frogs do, too. (Though, the frogs do not smoke.) I know they can be magic — fairy portals, the signs of sacred spaces, midnight dances, gatherings, conjurings, forbidden reveries. I know not to cross them, break them, or build on them. They are the tools of wild, spiteful things. Crickets use them as drums. I know that if you bring your lips close (but not too close, for some are ground bullets full of poison) and whisper a phrase, read the Latin aloud, have a virgin chant at the top of his lungs, something — something — might happen. I know where to find such phrases, and I know how to use maps to find the mushrooms. But this is all I know.

On the Fruiting Body
The body of a mushroom is not its body nor a mushroom at all but rather the sex organ of the creature. “Creature” probably isn’t the right word, and neither is “sex organ.” This is sort of like how we say “vagina” but really mean “vulva” — the vagina, of course, being the hidden parts, the buried parts, the machinery, the sex organs of the creature, but the word we use for its display regardless. This is, of course, all about the right words.

On Spore Rain
Poison mother, full of spores, do you grow or do you germ? Scatter the earth with stardust children born by seeming miracle – each a shard of glitter who will burst some dewy morning, suddenly, a gilled-grey baby. Holy mother with meated body, fruits flowing from the wales of your nubuck breast. Give us this day our dew and dawn, give us our toxic inheritance. We will bloom at our deaths ever more.

On What is Uncomfortable About Mushrooms
Why can’t a mushroom bloom, can’t it blossom? Why can’t its velvet fins and gills — as delicate as wet paper — effloresce, fan themselves around the stalk, pompon, an open umbrella. Too wet? Too alien? Is the mushroom too vegetable-seeming to be sensual? Too female with its birthing? Or is it too male with its shapes? Perhaps, too queer — intersexed, inhabiting both, the semantics of it too strange?

On the Toadstool Lady
There is a woman in the woods crawling on her hands and knees, her dress soiled, dusty, sequined with pine needles, sticking leaves. She folds her hands around the ground, smiling at something small and quiet from behind her glasses. Her beaten wicker basket overflows with earthy-smelling and dirt-clotted buttons and mosses, shoots and laces. Later she is behind a tree, bent over a pad of paper, her hands blackened from dirt and graphite, smudges crossing her cheeks and forehead. She draws a ribbon around the prize she’s sketched — a mushroom she’s not yet seen — a wreath of flowers, too. She writes in hurried script — gorgeous.

On Rocks

If I’m remembering my community college geology class correctly, and I am:

On [ORDERED STRUCTURE MINERAL MOLECULE SWALLOW IRON CHERRY STONE] Carnelian
The stone’s name comes from the name of a fruit, which is, of course, another kind of stone. I swallow the stone and hear it clack against the pit of my stomach, the drop’s impact making a little echo in my body like it might echo in a canyon. I swallow
the stone
the gemstone
the crystal
because it will bring me order because I need to be ordered.
I swallow it because its murky red orange color — a color like it has been stained by something much redder than itself — a color like iron — the stone itself the product of our element iron — represents strength. The stone is iron, iron is strength, to iron is to smooth something out. I need smoothing out.
I swallow the carnelian.

On Purity
Too pure. As though merely being pure isn’t enough — as though purity can be mere. What is too pure? A single total element or form of matter that refuses to share electrons to bond, refuses to be forged under pressure or fire with a similar bit of matter. Refuses.
I know what you’re thinking. Hymen imperforatus: a septum stretched over the vaginal opening like a drum. Percussive. Purity is inherently female, and purity is inherently lonely.
Which kinds of stones are too pure? Limestones, quartzes, diamonds.
Which kinds of people are too pure? The lonely absence of impurity. The lifelong pursuit of oneness. The ability to resist all influence by others. The ability to ignore oneself, the single most unstable element. A lockbox. See? Feminine.
When it just is — the way purity would like to be — it is fine. Igneous, vacuous, still and whole, a locked and silent system. It is fine to be this complete.
Purity is only a problem when it is applied, expected, expectant.

On Precious and Rare Gems
A rare thing, a glistening thing, a jewel or a shining metal.
[Why are our treasures always things we can melt/cook/boil/profit from/hold as our own in buildings where they don’t belong?]
I feel sad for these lonely things dredged up from their private places. They are perfect bait with their flabby soft fins, bodies like tubes of cookie dough.
[Museums are the highest order of freak show: gathering specimens, ordering them, numbering and cataloging without any respect for their real lives or their families or jobs, children: collect these bones, pin these wings, preserve this jaw and spread all of it out on velvet, under glass for display.]
Holotype — that’s pretty close to “halo” like an angel, and it must be because:
[1. caught 2. caught 3. “caught” 4. sometimes entrapped — you know, like caught or “caught” 5. found dead on beach 6. stranded 7. found washed ashore]
[1. dissected 2. consumed 3. sent to market 4. deposited 5. discarded 6. buried 7. ??? 8. partially consumed]
[1. tail broke off 2. found alive with head wound 3. likely to have been pregnant 4. tattered and broken 5. cut open]
it’s always dead.

On Fieldstones
left by the Laurentide — that old girl — as she flattened our states, as she scraped by.
Anything that must scrape by will leave some things behind. You have to skimp on the details, like the dishes (for a few days, a week, a thousand years) or the laundry or your marbles (like fieldstones).
But don’t worry about her. The Laurentide got by. She was gouging out the Great Lakes until she was starving and even then she got by, scraping by, clawing at the land. She left her fingerprints in the earth. We’re still watching freezing soil dredge up the past, churning out stones each winter because of her touch.  You know, like when you start dreaming about an old girlfriend when you’re drinking. When you listen to a song that makes you a little sad. That's her. That's the Laurentide getting to you.

On Ekphrasis

Here it is. I am doing a craft talk. What is Ekphrasis? Let’s look at the roots of the word, its phonemes, the building blocks. First, the Greek “ek“ which, of course, comes from the much longer word “eek” — that is, a scream — and so “ek” is to be afraid, to feel terror and fright and fear. Then “phrasis” which probably means “to make” or “to do” or “to mold together with your hands the elements of one thing into another thing” — and that is, of course, Ekphrasis. To be so shocked, awed, terrified, bewildered, the whole sublime spectrum of fear, by some such thing as a work of art or a piece of music that one is pressed into action. To feel as though that same muse who inspired the original artist has come to them as well and so they say, "I see her, too!" and so — eek! — and phrasis — that person is made to make something by something else that someone else has already made. Ekphrasis.
 
On “Headless Woman, Palisades Park, NJ.” by Diane Arbus
I saw her, too. On a semi-trailer in Florida in 1996. Her foot bobbed like the tick of a clock and just as impatient, so I decided not to stare at the unnatural broadness of her shoulders, the way she seemed to be wearing my brother’s football pads. Her broadness did, to my wizened 10 year old eye, seem odd — even without her head. She was clearly bored. Her foot bobbed. On a patio side table — you know, a little garden number she probably picked up at Kmart, the clerk a little confused by the “SEE I.D.” on the back of her credit card, “Ma’am...?” and she pulls out a Pennsylvania driver’s license with a blank space for a head shot — on the patio side table was a Diet Coke with a straw (which made perfect sense, of course) and a stack of magazines all greasy and crinkled from being read over and over, three nights a week and three states over. I admit, I thought briefly about this — how might one read without a face? How does she — but I stopped. These are rude things to think, and besides, she was staring, impatient, her foot bobbing. I had to leave.
 
On Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
What did Hans dream of down there in the dark? His eyes two wide and open black voids that stared back unflinching into the Earth’s void, that obsidian black, that black without glass, that cavernous, open-mouthed black? He dreamed of grey. Of the blue salt grey of the sky over the sea, of the leaden green of the sea itself. Of dirty and dusty sheep as they grazed for dingy sea foam lichens in field of basalt. He dreamed of brushed wool, woolen caps, woolen pants, the woolen parts of a woman he knew whose grey husband had long died, she reading the grey print from a grey book aloud to him in the soft grey light of morning. In the dark black, in the center of the Earth, Hans dreamed of grey. I saw it, too.

On “The Kitten” by Mary Oliver
I saw it, too. In the night, in the space between wake and dreaming, I saw the watery marble, the single little mewl like a baby’s laughter in the night, the sole and single eye rolling up to stare at me. What do you know, I said, about vision? About secrets and omens and foreshadowing? Maybe nothing, the kitten replied, but I’m not the one who asked. Its eye blinked and I could see then that it was growing, filling up the whole space of the forehead and then the whole of its face. Amazing, I said, and woke up.

On the Five Love Languages

On Gift Giving
When I was sixteen years old I worked at a fast food restaurant. I made and sold hamburgers and French fries. I liked my job because you got to eat French fries and you got milkshakes if you worked on Thursdays, and my friends worked there with me, and I was in love with a boy who worked there too. That’s another story, but not a very interesting one. This story is much better. One day a man in the drive-through ordered two plain hamburgers, and when he pulled up to pay I was delighted to find that he had two dogs in his backseat. The hamburgers were for the dogs. I was glad for the dogs. A few weeks later another man came through and he also had a dog in his car. I ran to the kitchen and made his dog a hamburger, even though he didn’t order one, and I put it in the bag. “There’s an extra hamburger for your dog,” I said. He looked surprised. He said “Thank you.”

On Acts of Service
I spent a lot of time listening to this record when I was sixteen.

On Quality Time
Granddad looked elderly even in 1933 when he was still young, his lungs still bright purple and full of the strong, ripe nodules of a young fish. Many of the thick, thumb-print scales were blotted black all along his body, more so than the average lungfish might be, giving him a distinct liver-spotted appearance. And, of course, he was a lungfish: primordial-looking, a big tadpole with lobed fins and a flat face, burying himself in the mud during droughts, breathing air. Preposterous. Breathing air because the lungfish itself is a species so enthralled with breathing air that when it returned to the sea from land it never kicked the habit. Granddad — again, a fish — breathed air for over 80 years at the Shedd Aquarium, sipping, gulping, slurping, his flat-faced mouth pressed out of the water, his visitors in awe of something they themselves take for granted — the act an almost conscious one, like a whale rising to the surface of the sea, like your own deep and mindful breathing, but Granddad — again — a fish. Breathing.

On Affirmation
Breathe. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re okay.

On Physical Intimacy
Okay. It is alleged that all fruits are erotic. They are supposed to be. I don’t know. I guess fruits are just the genitals of a plant — you know — its means of reproduction. Seeds and pollen and all. We eat this. We eat plants’ genitals. I don’t think fruits mean to be erotic. An apple is just so red. And shining. They always seem to be wet. And grapes are never one but many. A bunch. That’s kind of kinky, isn’t it? Things like bananas and oranges must be undressed. Coconuts must be cracked — a hard win. We all like a little chase. Still, I just don’t think fruits mean to be erotic. I think they mean to reproduce. They are, most likely, tired of being sexy. It must be that only idiots eroticize fruit or believe in eroticism at all. I think we just mean to reproduce. Why get metaphorical, philosophical about sex like it could mean anything else besides chemicals and physical response to stimuli and seeds and pollen and all? It isn’t really as magical as we want it to be. It isn’t the words we apply: love or even lust. We just want it to be. We just want to pretend it’s more than our bodies making fruit. Anyway, I prefer vegetables.

On Forgetting

As containers we can each only hold so much, as any container must also contain a limit. A measuring cup. A one-gallon bucket. Each has its own unit of volume, as do you, as do I. I make space for the things I must remember each week: wipe off the dining room table, make a phone call that will arrange a purposeful meeting, consume a nourishing meal so that my body may continue to carry me onward and onward and onward. Sometimes my container holds the memory of something from long ago, something painful or something no longer useful to me (as remembering to eat is useful) and I am confused and a little hurt that I could remember once seeing a train sliding along the red rocks of Nevada when I was a toddler, but not to pay to for the electricity I use. I could remember the time my father and I saw a dog fall out of the bed of a pickup truck in Alabama and then run along the ditch, afraid but exhilarated, his blood surely steaming with adrenaline as he tried to catch up with his master, but I could forget to write this letter to you.

On Forgetting My Dead Mother’s Birthday (Reprise)
I am surprised that it’s my mother’s birthday. And then I am surprised that she is dead. And then I am surprised it’s my birthday. Time is a breeze you only notice when it’s cold. Ten years have passed and in 10 years so little has changed. I am still the same. I am always the same. I imagine my mother is the same, though I know that not to be true. I know she changed as her brain changed and then I know she died. I picture the way she looked knowing that the way she looks now is ashen. Is literally ash. I forget to remember that she is gone because she has been gone for so long. I am used to her goneness. I forget to remember she was real because she has been gone for so long. I remember very little. It’s fall now, and soon after that it will be winter.

On Ball’s Pyramid
A volcano the earth forgot it had sitting up on the continental shelf, eroded, long unused and in need of dusting. That’s Ball’s Pyramid. Just a sharp little ocean tooth with nothing on it besides the signs of time: crumbling rocks, saltwater-worn edges, a single scrubby shrub (melaleuca) growing in a crack like plaque, and then, of course, the insect. Long thought extinct and then forgotten, but then found, like that thing on the shelf you forgot and then found. You know the thing. The insect is thick, stick-shaped, and black and in fact it is a species of giant black stick insect. Originally discovered there on the pyramid, they were thought to have died out. Rumors spread about their continued existence but had to remain unsubstantiated for many years, as journeys to the pyramid are difficult and climbing up its steep craggy incisor is typically forbidden. Then, they were found again under the scrubby melaleuca, a little cache of forgotten creatures on a forgotten rock. “I forgot we even had these,” someone must have cried.

On What’s Under the Ground
So much of what’s bad we bury. Our feelings, our secrets, our dead. Maybe bad isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean — the things we can no longer bear to be with, to stand near, to look into the eye, the things we no longer have a use for. So we ask the ground to take these things into it, to hold, to support, to rot and be forgotten. This is our ritual of memory. I will write down what I wish to keep, pen it to the calendar on the fridge, tie a little string around my finger. But I bury that which I choose to forget. I imagine you spend a great deal of your days looking up — I do, too. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe we should worship the ground we walk on and treat our feet as holy. Spread memory — our feelings, our secrets, our dead — in soil like seed and nurture whatever grows. See the things that writhe in earth and ask that they see us. Maybe there’s more in the ground than the things we’d like to forget. Maybe those things deserve to be remembered.

Rhiannon Conley is a poet and writing instructor living in North Dakota. Her work has appeared in Moonsick Magazine, The Rat’s Ass Review, The Roaring Muse and The North Dakota Quarterly and is forthcoming from Literary Mama and Whale Road Review. Her first chapbook, Less Precious, was published by Semiperfect Press in 2017. She writes an irregular newsletter of short poetic essays called Smol Talks and more regularly tweets @RhiannonAdmidas.

Bloodlust by Erin Lyndal Martin

I was a lightning rod. I was a bursting seed-pod. I was popped cork and shipless bottle from corner-store champagne. I was hunched on the peach-plaid linoleum behind her bathroom door. I was hiding, we were hiding. From who? From our mothers across the country who, despite our ages, would know we'd been smoking marijuana? We couldn't be found out.

Pinky-swear, she demanded, another splash of champagne. The bottle was glowing green. I wanted to drink the light it gave off. I wanted to drink our hiding.

She read from her teenage diary: WHYWON'T A VAMPIREJUST TAKE ME AWAY?!?!?! Triple underscore.

I wanted to know if one had. I wanted to know if something in her still wanted that.

She stretched out her legs, impossibly smooth. Her painted toenails touched the wall. She was prettier than me, and her hair was straight. Quiet, you, she said, turning to another page. We listened. Was her daughter awake, was the white smoke crawling underneath the door? We went outside to check.

Back in her diary, she was learning about Satanism, and all the Satanists she'd met collected knives and comic books.

They don't love me, she wrote. They just get used to me. For a moment, we were old again.

I wanted to go back to the vampires. Tell me more, I said. What kind of vampire? Raw-boned and blonde. This was the only right answer.

I never had a Jesus phase, she said. I told her it might be on its way. She hit the bong and crossed herself.

You know, I said, we could still find you a vampire. Hugging her knees to her chest, all she asked was how. I searched her for traces of another question. All I saw was the lace of her skirt. 

We can make a Ouija board, see? I traced letters on the floor with my pointer finger. All we need is paper and pen.

She passed me the bong and said it was on. Exhaling, I grabbed the champagne and followed her. We shoved aside a stack of student essays and sat down at the table, wondering who should write the alphabet.

You do it, I said. You're the one who wants him. The house was quiet. I could hear her eyelashes blink against her glasses.

You know, she said, vampires aren't dead. Will a Ouija board work? I asked if we should use the telephone instead.

Hush, she said, and started her impossibly perfect script.

Our vices depleted, she started stabbing her hand with a paper clip, convinced a vampire would be more likely to come if there was blood on our board. I watched her palm for broken skin, but nothing happened. She found a brooch somewhere—I saw rhinestones as she jammed the pin into her hand. She pressed her hand to the paper, then waved it across like a beauty queen.

I laid a quarter on the paper. We stared as if the letters were Russian roulette.

Hold on, I said. We gripped the coin while I whispered to her to invoke. If there is a blonde, raw-boned vampire who would like to speak with us, come now.

I wanted to know how we could be sure he was raw-boned.

Let's ask him, she said. We did. Chiseled, he said. I'm cut.

She asked him if he was the one she'd wanted to take her away. He said yes. He told me my red hair creamed him.

I asked him how he bled. Through my teeth and tears, he said.

This must be Real, I told her. I couldn't have thought of that.

By now I was starting to want him too. She was flirting, asking if he liked her blood. I tried for a papercut.

He said it was ironic to talk about irony. She took down her hair. I got up to light a candle. It guttered and sparked before it burned. I thought about the human brain. I thought about the alphabet. Our two fingers on the quarter, the coin sailed over the blood-streaked letters. He promised to take us away. I promised to follow.

Erin Lyndal Martin is a creative writer, music journalist, and artist. Her work has appeared in Salon, No Depression, Gigantic Sequins, and Yalobusha Review, among others.

Reoccurring Nightmares from My Youth I Hold onto at Twenty-Six by Samuel J Fox

I.

There are nights I turn into a sleeping wolf. Nightmares are only the mind saying you have something to be guilty of, and everybody is. Domesticate me. I want to be brave instead of beast. I want the moon to be nothing but a Xanax instead of a lozenge loosening my howl. The nightly rain isn’t subtle. It clatters around me in the dark and in my dream I am standing naked under a streetlamp. Waiting. For what, I do not know. God? His sparring partner? A lover? Either way, I grow hair. I bear a snout and fang and tail. American werewolf. Lonely lycanthrope. I’m haunted by a single thought: the only time I can be human is upon waking. There is blood on my paws. Take this rag: please, teach me to wipe this massacre off.

II.

4 am. The witching hour is dead and effusing into a cobalt dim sky. I stumble like Judas from his own self-flagellation and reach for the Tylenol. Migraines come after seeing you die in my sleep. It’s what I fear about living here with you. You are passed out on the couch, snoring, an empty beer can on its side under your hand. A stain on the carpet. In my dream, you die young. You die because you contract a horrible disease that drives you mad. You go out into the world speeding, a daredevil lunatic hell-bent on reaching a space where you can find peace. You re-enter the world later this morning. You too reach for the Tylenol and wash it down with Busch. I can’t tell if I’m still dreaming. Whichever it is, I have heard some people receive visions while they sleep.

III.

Upon waking, I recall the conversation I just had with Kurt Cobain, who has now returned to his pose in the poster above my bed. He’s taking a drag off of a Marlboro, arm wrapped loosely over his dreadnaught. He said I’m not guilty of being unique; I’m guilty of believing that I am. I run my hands under the tap and splash my face with scalding water. The heat tears me up and I wake. I’m laughing constantly at the devil: she’s nothing like she said she’d be. And of course, right on cue, my ex-lover walked into the dream with red-latex body suit and ram horns. She strokes me under my chin. Depression is another word for possession by a world that doesn’t give a shit. My ex-girlfriend nods in approval. I text her that morning to ask her if she’s alright. I don’t tell her she tortured me while Kurt Cobain chain-smoked. I tell her I love her. She doesn’t respond.

IV.

God rides a Honda Sportster; says it’s easier on the liver. I meet God in a bar within seven miles of a desert painted with saguaros and rattlesnake. God tells me I will forever walk this world alone, no matter how many men or women I grow to love. However, God says I can take a ride with him into the next town. In this nightmare, I say no: I don’t want to be a free-floating soul without anything to hold me down. I would rather have something with bone-scaffold, something with blood-course, something with flesh on it to keep me warm. God gruffly understands. God roars off on his bike, the side of it reading The Spirit. I wake up to the musty taste of whiskey in my mouth; I wake up to the smell of exhaust outside in the October air.

V.

I am a young buck, my ten point crown laddering a short distance from my skull. My love is hunting me. She has a Remington .22 and is tracking me. I want to speak to her and say I love her. But every time I come around a tree-bend, she fires. I bolt away. She fires. I lightning whitetail under the eaves. I leap, free to get away, but instead I stay close. When she begins to reload, I approach her. I come up to her and turn my side to her. I want her to feel the freedom of my air-boned back, my sleek hide, my trophy eyes staring into hers. I put my snout to her face. She is still and I know then I am in danger. I turn my back. I let her know, by laying down, I will not run. She does what she came to do, and I wake, my tears lead-heavy.

VI.

I am a child again. I have a black balloon in my hands. I am going to a funeral. I think it’s mine, but I’m still alive. I watch from the hillside as my family congregates and weeps and prays for mercy over my soul. My black balloon bobs in the air. I watch and realize I am not me; I am the alternative me. My alternative me is my brother, dead at 3 minutes. I look like him at seven years old. In this dream, it was not alternate me who died: it was daily me. I do not fear what I do not understand this time. I realize sadness has everything to do with situation. I realize I don’t want to suffer anymore. I let go of the black balloon. It flees and arrives in the branches of a cedar tree. It bursts into dark slivers of every lie I ever told myself. 

Samuel J Fox is a bisexual essayist and poet living in North Carolina. He has poems appearing in F.A.L.D., Maudlin House, and Horn and Ivory; he has essays forthcoming in Cold Creek Review, Ellipsis Zine, and Moonchild Magazine. He has been nominated twice for Best of the Net for 2017. You can find him on Twitter (@samueljfox) or at www.samueljfox.com.

An Interview with Elisabeth Krohn, Editor-in-Chief at Sabat Magazine

Elisabeth Krohn is founder and editor-in-chief at Sabat Magazine, a publication of witchcraft and feminism, female archetypes and contemporary art. She launched Sabat Magazine in March 2016 (The Maiden Issue) and published issue two (The Mother) in September 2016 and issue three (The Crone) in March 2017. Sabat Magazine was shortlisted for the Magazine of the Year Award 2016 by Stack and took home a Pencil in the Independent Magazine category at the D&AD Awards 2017. Grimoire caught up Elisabeth Krohn recently to talk about the magic of witches and magazine making, as well as who would be in her ideal pop culture coven. 

 GRIMOIRE: What was your curatorial process like for the magazine? 

EK: Assembling Sabat was always an intuitive process. That said, I think it’s been wonderful to have a really niche concept to be creative around, that we could push in different directions to accommodate sparks of inspiration or happy accidents that presented themselves along the way. I really wanted Sabat to embody a sense of narrative and dialogue, echoing the phases of life, or a relationship, headlines or graphic spreads that talked to each other expressing a kind of ambivalence or conflict about female existence. I’d listen to Stevie Nicks or Hole or read up on Jenny Holzer and shamelessly pinch lyrics or quotes I felt were appropriate and try to collage that with 17th century engravings, a really surface-level fascination with Jungian psychology, moody analogue photography and tech-age hexing, hoping to encapsulate a slice of witchy womanhood (but also where I was at) at this point in time.   

Was it important to you to feature a range of different mediums and approaches to witchcraft? 

To be honest, when I started the project I wasn’t really aware of the diversity of the modern witchcraft world, I was holding the hoof of a unicorn so to speak, not knowing there was a lot more to this magical creature. Through building Sabat, we gained access to a growing network of witches, writers, and creatives, both irl and online. Our knowledge base expanded from that - I’ve learned most of what I now know about witchcraft from doing interviews with witches, but also from our contributors’ submissions. The magazine grew into shape in a very organic way.

Could you talk about Sabat’s origins? What led you to create the magazine, and what kinds of influences were you drawing from, both in terms of how the magazine was constructed and in its witch and occult-themed content?

I made this zine (called Sabat) about “pop vs. real” teen witches when I was doing my first project for my MA back in 2015. Through my nostalgic eyes, the 1990s maiden witch was very alluring, both as an aesthetic but also as an analogy for coming into power as a young woman and the struggle of figuring out what to do with your powers. It was hard to find people who would talk to me about witchcraft and to find this young witch I was sure could not just be a product of my imagination. I approached witchcraft shops, online forums, and finally through social media discovered the world of the #witchesofinstagram where this amazing network of young witches was growing before my eyes. 

For the first issue, finding contributors and convincing them I knew what I was doing was a challenge. Sabat’s designer Cleber de Campos and I were making a magazine for the first time, it was not an obvious lifestyle magazine concept to say the least, and in so many ways we were making it up as we went along. 

Witchcraft has a rich visual history. Right now, a new generation of photographers, artists and writers are exploring this heritage in a fresh and contemporary way and communicating their work online. Working with a concept of the ancient and the instant, we tried to create a kind of micro-cosmos around this collaborative community, but also a publication that is a strong haptic experience. It’s been amazing to scroll down our Instagram feed and see how Sabat has become this object that sits comfortably on a reader’s altar with tactile tools and tarot decks.

There’s a lot of writing going around the internet right now about the rising popularity of the witch in feminism, fashion, and art. Why do you think witchcraft and the figure of the witch are experiencing such a renaissance at this particular historical and cultural moment? 

If we look at witchcraft and feminism in particular, the upsurge in mainstream attention and awareness for both subjects correlated in the 70s and 90s and again now. For the girls that grow up today, this male-dominated world of insatiable consumption has an air of uncertainty, tragedy, even dystopia, about it. We appear to have an ocean of options, but at the same time: are we changing anything? Can we really be and do whatever we like? Do we have powers? Echoing the sentiments of a lot of women, the modern witch is informed of the structures that keep women in their place. She craves a less patriarchal and cynical world and uses new tools to hack the system. But she also offers us another, left hand path, one that is mystical and nature-orientated where we come into our own feminine power as women and witches. However ancient, witchcraft resonates with many values in contemporary society: individualism, gender equality, personal empowerment and environmentalism and becomes a surprisingly progressive passageway to spiritual enlightenment. 

Is the witch a figure of resistance?

Yes and a powerful one at that. What I really like about the witch is that in whatever incarnation she retains a sense of individualism and independence, of being the necessary outsider or ambivalent archetype that challenges the status quo in her politics, thoughts, practices or simply in her way of life. 
 

What does the word “witch” mean to you? 

A witch is one who dares to stand alone as an individual, who believes in her powers to evolve and change herself and her world. She encourages a sense of connectedness yet is aware of her own boundaries. Trusting her intuition, she feels the smallest of vibrations and allows space for magic and mystery.

Does magic play a role in your day-to-day life?

Yes, more and more I would say! On one hand, I’m a skeptic who cringes passionately at the theatrical, any kind of baroque language and ceremony, but I also look for synchronicity everywhere and engage in A LOT of magical thinking around the most mundane things. After Sabat, it’s as if a lot of thoughts patterns and theories found a more concrete form, from small practical rituals to aspects of philosophy I’d like to explore further. I’m quite convinced our subconscious world, a world of symbols, myths and personal and universal archetypes, rules our life trajectory in powerful ways. Connecting with different levels of our selves, whether that is through psychotherapy or witchcraft or just being creative, is a way to understand and flow with this rather than ignore it and then end up drowned by our own fears or desires. 

 
Sabat’s issues are thematically organized around the figures of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Why were these archetypes especially meaningful and useful for you?

To push my own limited perspective as a young woman, I wanted to explore womanhood through these three lenses echoing the Neo-Pagan deity the Triple Goddess and the phases of the moon. I thought it would be an interesting way to approach the changing perspectives and new challenges that face us at various stages of female existence. It could also be an analogy for all the life-death-rebirth micro-cycles of our everyday lives.  It’s not just been educational in terms of learning about witchcraft and learning to practice it, it has also been a feminist journey, from naive ingénue to admiring apprentice. 

Sabat has become wildly successful and beloved (you could even say it has cult status!). Were you surprised by the strength of your readership, and why have you decided that now is the time to end the magazine?

Thank you (!!!)  —  it’s really wonderful and absurd that it has gained such a comparatively big readership so quickly. I could not have imagined that in my wildest dreams. Sabat was always going to be a triple goddess trilogy, I’m just really glad that we managed to do the three issues as we set out  —  I hope they embody a sense of the cycle, of growing up, while at the same time keeping a conceptual and aesthetic essence throughout.  

Now that Sabat has ended its run, what projects are next on the horizon for you?

I’m working on a reincarnation that might explore similar themes, although in a slightly different format.
 

One last question: if you could build your own coven of witches from pop culture, who would you invite, and why?

Ohh… That would have to be a like Courtney Love, Roxane Gay, Anna Biller, Stevie Nicks, Tavi Gevinson, Lorde, Marina Abramovic... I’d be thrilled and terrified to be part of their coven!

Immaculate Conception by Jaclyn Watterson

Missing many things, and sad, a girl faced a watery pool.

And from that pool, a frog like a glistening turd popped.

I was the girl, and my grandmother the frog. This was not a dream—I could see my throat in the mirror opposite the toilet, my own bathroom—but my grandmother was two years deceased, so it ends.

Bugs, viruses, mold, and sickness surrounded us, yet my grandmother was undeniably visible. The turd-shaped frog, how did I know she was my grandmother? By the Miraculous Medal round her neck. For us who have recourse to thee, conceived without sin—

It was an item I had hoped to inherit.

Sometimes the disappeared fall from the sky. At other times, she pops from a pool. In Erie, Pennsylvania, toilets flush to the bottom of the lake, and drinking water we skim from the top. This does not need to be explained.

From my sadness, incessant cramping, and glistening jest, my grandmother manifested manifold intimacies—all ours. In a word, she appeared. Sat upon the bare skin of my thigh, below the mirror, as I crouched there on the toilet, squeezing, pushing, occasionally thrusting—to no avail.

Give me a kiss, my grandmother hummed. And she held my face—as she had been wont to do in life—between tiny webbed hands, succulent and wet.

Keep close, every moment of our lives.

Remember a particular swerve, a kiss denied, her lips smacking the air next my cheek—a mistake never balmed—on the last day of her life. Remember I did not kiss her goodnight.

Bearing this now, I acquiesced readily, in the bathroom, cramping and aching. Soggy lips on sopping pores, I kissed my grandmother’s entire frog body.

And in my ardor, sucked it down with a womanly slurp.

I swallowed my grandmother, for all animals die, and nothing need be suppressed, but only contained. To constipate is to press closely, and I do this with my grandmother’s memory and body both.

Facing my throat, still and again, in that mirror, swallowing once more, I complied. Up and then down, nothing coming out, and silent.

The Miraculous Medal, removed but not redeemed, accompanied my grandmother on her return disappearance. We do not handpick inheritances.

We dedicate and consecrate— Another fruitless attempt, I flushed. For each one of us a sure sign. The grace of a happy death.

Jaclyn Watterson is left-handed, vegetarian, and of choleric temperament. She currently resides in Atlanta, and gardens in fair weather on a small balcony. Her first book, a collection of fictions and horrors entitled Ventriloquisms, is forthcoming from Willow Springs Books/Eastern Washington University in late 2017.