the poet’s zodiac Kristy Bowen
the poet’s zodiac Kristy Bowen
_______of 100 dancing girl press & studio
spring
aries Today, you are a brocade hoax. Desire spreading shadows under you like a tree. Your throat grown woozy with peacock feathers. Like the pearl in the oyster, irritation breeds something shimmering in your interior. Do not be tempted by wishbones or cloud cover. Enthralled with scissors hidden beneath your mattress. In your fevered sleep, imagine your small hands reaching for branches full of chokecherries rattling at the windows. Rusted shovels full of dirt and ashes. How you filled your sails, your sheets unhitched with wind, and sailed home.
taurus There are too many paper hearts in your stomach today. Be wary of round stones in the pockets of men. You spread, wide and fertile, even if you have forgotten this alphabet of scratches and rude shapes. Paper birds outside your windows shift in the breeze and catch fire when the wind is right. Do not mistake the sweet skin of revenge for the flesh of regret. You carry a heavy baby that is hope for several blocks. Until the air escapes it like a balloon caught in the trees. The tiniest parts of your ears can be deceiving when it comes to distance. Trust your eyes only, the flickers that singe your optic nerve and set the horizon aflame.
gemini March is so thick you can fold it like a blanket. Beware of staircases and plastic palm trees. In this month, it's best to drive around the block a few times before going home. Beauty is waste, and waste, beauty, but the taxi driver is in love with you incessantly. How you lose your cardigan in the rain. Your soul, a loose button that you roll in your mouth and occasionally swallow. Your body emptied of every sharp object, where you stand at the end of the street in oncoming traffic, waiting for any kind of hesitation.
cancer Today is a sorry mess of old license plates and rusty wires. There’s a mirage over the horizon, but you are still surrounded by river up to your waist. Tread carefully. Spring will get its hands around your throat and squeeze if you let it. There are strings beneath your skin that pull and ache. Your eyes a muddled color, like weak tea. In the catch basin of your heart, things grow unruly. This misfortune of your hands placid in your lap. Look for the crossroads, beware the panic note. Your dress saturated with rainwater and blueing at the hem.
leo The pigeons beneath your window are restless. The full moon, a procession of strange houses you are unable to live in. Doors you are unable to open. Beware cheap and discarded shoes littered alongside the road. The proliferation of tiny, smashed porcelain cats. In the garden beds, everything in disarray. All your best specimens ruined. Tinged with rot. Be mindful of bathtubs, wristwatches, asphyxia. The body you keep beneath the floor. Bartenders, buckshot, beautiful dead ends. The flash of a discarded red heel.
virgo Among the pear trees, you are ever so orderly, collecting your thoughts like bits of sea glass and string. This month will bring miscarriages, literal and figurative. Crows gossiping over thunder. April is tricky, sticky with sugar cubes dropped one by one into your tea. Over breakfast you savor contradiction, a final exam to which you know every answer before the question is asked. The door to which you’ve hidden the one remaining key inside your chest. A line of 7’s scratched out neatly on paper. Outside, the yards orderly, fenced and precise.
libra This month, you bleed easily—the kitchen knife, the paper cut. Every payphone, a call you shake loose from your pockets. Imagine the rungs of a ladder. Other houses, other lives. You will be nostalgic for every boy you never kissed. Everything absolutely beautiful, but utterly impossible. All of your sisters are terrible liars, their cheekbones smudged with ash. Do not open yourself to trailer parks, training bras, gutters of light. The virgin marys nestled in half bathtubs as far as the eye can see. Seek the insides of statues, sticky with honey that blisters the tongue. Be the parakeet that survives the well entirely intact.
scorpio Beware deer bones, dogwood, drownings. Every coffee can you find will be full of rusty nails. March will shift like freight in the dark of you, but overall you are surgical, surefooted in the world. Collect the husk of wasp nests, wintering at the top of the roof's peak. Speak only to strangers. When you lower your bedsheets down to the ground, be prepared for turbulence. Draw a picture of a dove to keep in your pocket. Nest your fist inside until your hand goes numb. Learn forgiveness, and if you can't, build it slowly with your bones until your body buckles with it.
sagittarius On Monday, a single feather appears at the bottom of your teacup, but you are lip-glossed and ready for anything. Love has worn you down to the smoothest, smallest marble. Desire gliding away from you like a boat over water. A mote you cannot cross. Do not be discouraged. Everything will smell like fire at first: your shoes, your bed, even the inside of your mouth. Spools of thread will unravel themselves for you on command. When he calls for you, it will sound far away, like maybe Texas or from within a deep hole. You have permission to pull all the fire alarms in your house if you have to. To lie down in the nearest bed and burn.
capricorn Everything you say this month sounds like an echo of something you may have said before. It's all bones and snow, and too pretty to really be a disaster. In your pantry, you keep the hearts of caged rabbits, the ribcages of waterfowl. No one blames you for the things you have mislabeled, misnamed and mistaken for wolves, circling your doorstep. They smell like elderflowers and gin, the men you open your thighs to in the dark. They are auspicious in the way of omens, which is to say, not at all. Every woman you meet will be named Anne, but your mistake her from No One or None. An alias you can't remember the origin of.
pisces Water sign or no, nothing prevents your throat swollen with shellfish. On your birthday, you wreck yourself in the bathroom of the restaurant. Sleep with an ex, cry over cocktails. Nothing can prepare you for the salt that gathers at the edges of your lips. The headache that lasts for days. It's a disaster, how the light breaks you even now. How his earlobes tasted like honey. How you came at the sound of his voice when he leaned you over the sink. Or, at least like to imagine you did. Actual satisfaction a long road filled with abandoned shipyards and a single schooner. Too far out on the horizon to save anyone.
aquarius Every day will feel like too much coffee or not enough. Brace yourself for the in-betweens, the bitten moons of your nails. How you devoured every citrus fruit in the house, down to the last bitter rind. How you fear driving, or dying, or diving from every balcony or bridge you come across. Winter wrote you open like a book, but you wait, napkin in your lap, for the ending to sidle up against you in the dark and purr. For sleep, clutching your shoes against your chest. Your dreams bad, unruly as children, but still they still assemble you in the dark, piece by piece. Limb by limb
summer
aries June will scratch at your door, breed nightshade and red wine. Do not tally your eggs until after the first storm. The silence of you makes a hole, but hold fast. The season brings witchcraft and weirding. Foxes gathering in the field. The landscape eating you bit by bit. Let it happen. Fall asleep, facedown, in flocks. Be the meadow and the meadow will become you. Be quiet, then quieter still. Each piece of earth you salted watered by other rivers than your own. Tend to the heart, its pale fleshy tether. The violin strings that bind it caught fast in your teeth.
taurus Everything will begin to feel like sacrifice. Tossing offerings into the volcano— dahlias, june bugs, the last of the gin. The wind is a signal, a sign. A cluster of branches in your throat blown sideways with lonely. On the kitchen floor, you trace the grain looking for a map, the place where it begins. The mossy detours that undo us one by one. Mind the river that traces its way back to the beginning. The oars you have to lose to get there. The women you drowned every spring. Men will follow you home from the market at night. Beware overpasses, hanging trees, the ditches thick with bluestem. The places where the moon pulls over you like a blanket.
gemini Summer is all glimmer and pulse. The flicker of headlights, the fracture of dawn. Feel it out with your fingers and its really all birds and bones with a soft spot along the interior shaped somewhat like a heart. Pay attention to the rain, the words you use to get from here to there. You stutter over hello, but still the gnaw of it wears through your dress. Every phone left off the hook and books scattered on every surface. Be kind to yourself, this world made of sparrows and light. Starlings and dark.
cancer There’s a catch that springs in your chest every time you fall in love. Do it often and at length. Do it well and with depth. Summer has a way of undoing you every single year and this one is no different. July will find you splayed on the hood of a car, counting stars. As for love, it’s feast or famine or possibly fire. In the grocery store. look the other way when a woman asks you for the last of the peaches you’ve hidden in your cart. They are already too soft to be eaten raw.
leo This month, avoid high rises. Elevators. The open road. Hope is a trick you best perform while sitting completely still. There are secret passages in the body you haven't even discovered yet. Keys you've yet to misplace. Trace your outline in chalk on the sidewalk, shake the trees from their moorings. Drown in dogwood blossoms if you must, but trust no one, every love song off note and every row boat floating off beyond reach. When morning comes for you, release every insect from their jar in the pantry, careful not to crush the wings. Be careful to note how violent they sing their own freedom. Be careful not to lose your own.
virgo Twilight will find you at the bottom of ravines, real or imagined. The lean of farmhouses after a flood. The blood of blackberries on your fingers. There were never enough flowers until there were way too many. Filling every bottle in the house. The throttle of summer a breathing thing, sticky with flies and overflowing the sink. Still, you follow the roads until they go nowhere else. Plant a seed in any open space, hospitable or no. Tend to any plant strong enough to tether to the world with twisted roots. Anything strong enough to hold fast.
libra Though summer is a beast, look for moments of temporary splendor. The mountainside full of lilacs even still. The motion of your hands upon the water, the weaving in and out of sleep. Dream deeply of breathing, the air filling your lungs like a balloon let go over a city you’ve never visited. By September, fill your pockets with keychains to hotel rooms you only imagined, their corners unfolding in your head like a matchbook. Here, the empty mirror. Here, the yellowed bedspread. Don’t be afraid to find the things you’ve hidden but are searching for. Check under the bed. Empty every drawer.
scorpio Every dusk undoes you. Every night, you wait for the sun to slip just pass the horizon. Slip between sheets and dream of deer running, one by one, across a clearing. Fear reaches inside you and places a fist around your heart, but do not allow it to squeeze. Hold it there like the doe, wide-eyed, in the headlights skimming the new corn. Cultivate stillness and necessity. Something born and already threading its way through the world unencumbered. How it pauses outside your window and breathes out softly.
sagittarius When the rain comes, let it. Let every hinge in your body open and swing free of itself. There will be time for moderation in winter. but now let the bees carry you. Ferry the weight of your heart across long distances. Kiss every lover that unlocks the box inside your chest. Be the river rocks, or better, be the river. Be the silver slip of minnows in the current. Press your lips against the cool stone of a statue. Be the moss that creeps slowly across its shadows.
capricorn There is no getting over the gardenias outside the gate. Because they belong to someone else, they glow all night like small moons. How you long to pluck them. Long to tuck them behind your ear and be disastrous with your love. Last night, you lured a stranger home and convinced him to vault the fence, but the bloom crumpled in his grasp. One, then another, til he grew tired of the game and went home. How you arranged the petals on the table and went to bed thirsty. The flirt of their scent in the air even still.
pisces The heat will force itself inside you. Soon every street wanders its way into a chaos of birdsong. Longings for rain and upheaval. Be diligent. No sooner have you rid the house of wasps than the beetles move in, scurrying beneath the sofa. Every morning, an equal opportunity for ruin or resplendence. The knots you tied to tether yourself to lovers untenable. Fierce with unraveling. Soon, the neighborhood is flush with flocks, overnight petals clogging the street basins. In all cases, avoid the cul-de-sacs, the ramshackle mailboxes. Rid yourself of sagging fences, their latches sprung loose with June.
aquarius Morning will burst with a thousand yeses. Dresses hung crooked in the closet. How you break yourself against doors that are not your own. Take every exit along the freeway. Fake your way through each fitful beginning. Your wants as thin and papery as discount roses, the 5 dollar medals of female saints. Hope leaves a stain you'd recognize anywhere. A tear in the seam of your day. By dawn the sheets smell like dirt and standing water. But hang them in the yard and they become the sky.
fall
aries Morning will eat you inside and out. Devour you bit by bit, til nothing is left but hunger. Til you linger in bookshops, running your fingers along spines that curl and crumble in your grasp. The wasps that create their paper houses know no more than you, but that they should build, chamber by chamber until the story is finished. You'll be famished, but lick each envelope fully before casting it to the wind. Bind the words to you like a bundle of sticks carried over long distances. The sisters you lost in the storm calling back to you across the blackness. Til once again, you remember their names.
taurus In this season, be careful of drop-offs. The soft fall of branches that break, then dangle. Moving through your day, you’ll suffer headaches and wind blown clean through your open spaces. Ducks frenzying the pond outside where you drowned your best intentions. Gave over to rain, to water-stained paperbacks floating off in the distance. You burn the toast, spoil the milk, and still autumn pursues you through doors you’re certain you shut. The grey of the landscape padding doggedly at your heels. Sycamores cracking loudly in the dark.
gemini All the roads converge under red and yellow leaves. One path fed into another until your summer is unreachable. Too far off in the distance to recall. In fall, you take to roaming and returning. How you wander in and out of memory. Your dress full of apples, hair full of brambles. Ambling until dark delivers you into the yard where you bury the rabbit you found dead in the grass. A button.. A bit of wire. The past that eats you bit by bit, until nothing is left but your bones.
cancer By September, you've cast off desire, quicksilvered into the river. Delivered your demons, full-bodied, into current. Do not be afraid of dusk, the slip of husks scraping the ground as they're plowed under. Only the dark knows the way back to your beginnings. The bodies swimming the length of your bloodstream. If you listen carefully, the words arrive glistening and new to your bed every midnight. Leave traces on the sheets, a bit of hair or shimmering scale. Bleed out on the bathroom floor until you pick up a pen and begin to write.
leo Summer will leave you burned out like a candle. Wandering the alleys of the city. Cat-like, fat with longing.. Fix yourself against fall like a thumbtack. Give over to card tricks and petty thefts. The purloined salt shaker a talisman, a point to return to again and again. In the restaurant, you wanted nothing, which is to say you wanted everything. Plated and sat before you. Wanted sustenance and denial at the same time. For every no to mean yes, every yes to mean no. Or later. For every seat at the table to be filled and empty at the same time, the weight of your silence rooting you in place.
virgo November is all witch's fingers and words. How you linger in doorways and mistake the rain for fog, faking your way through. Taking every shortcut through the city, nesting with the animals that move into your bed. Fear breathes closest to your ear, but hope curls around your feet and falls asleep. Keeps you warm through winter, but leaves a mess on the sheets--fur and blood and discarded feathers. Be careful not to mistake love for warmth, or lust for touch. Take two aspirin and fall asleep to the sound of tiny bones shaking in the cold.
libra Love is a burnt-out stick. A trick of wind and light. All feign and frighten and plagues of frogs. November tightens its noose around the center of your chest, the best of your excuses cast off where the leaves seep red on the horizon. Where the dogs howl all night, breaking their teeth against the fence. How long til the animals sense the blood that pools in the darkest places, that beats its small machinery. It’s clamor of bottle feeds and need. The pulse that hums with thunderstorms. The end of all your beginnings coming up at you like a bucket in a well, swollen with rain.
scorpio
Wherever you thought you were going, reconsider the path. The bathwater scalds your foot, but still the roof leaks and the mice creep beneath the tub. Whatever you let go of, the rope of sleep pulls it back like a dead swimmer. All your fortunes will be unfortunate, plagued by men with open chests, open hands. The fan dance of their deceptions. Forget whatever you came for. In the room at the end of the hall, your silence holds a space of its own against the door. You go in and out, but still the house fades every time you close your eyes. Each time you leave the yard, it vanishes.
sagittarius For every broken phonebooth, you trade a tooth in pocket. A rusted locket. The back parking lot grown thick with weeds. In the mornings, tread carefully. The dead collect their objects with startling accuracy. Recall their devotions as thunderstruck, as dumb luck. Fuck with the lights in your kitchen, and still the witch moths flicker at the windows, eating their way through the screens. Breathe carefully in the dark. Pull at the roots in your cellar until nothing is left but stone, smooth as a coffin. Where you bury the black rabbits and their beginnings. Their terrible skins.
capricorn October is a barrel of rotten leaves. A disappoinment , but still you buckle yourself into your clothes each day. Pray for fire, sweeping over the horizon. The desire for misbegotten lovers, burning in their beds. When you open your arms to them, your throat swells with thirst, but the worst of it resides in the past. The hungry mouth of June. Now everything slides clean off the bone of you. Entire forests take flame beneath the harvest moon. Go forward knowing the tree still lives at its core, grows and blooms under tangled char.
pisces When the rain comes, open your mouth to it. Scatter your pebbles to all four directions of wind. Bind yourself to the closest oak and let it soak you to the bone. In the beginning, you carried too much. Now, nothing but the weight of your own sighs. Be tenuous. Be tenacious. Open the doors wide and live inside the storm that swallows the house. In the dark, beneath the branches, the grackles thrum from the farthest reaches of memory. The open cave of their throats filling with rain.
aquarius There are rooms in your house you haven’t discovered yet. Closets filled with discarded fish nets littered with stars. A pile of broken doll parts. In your heart, tiny moths thrum the bare bulbs in a hundred hallways. Steer you ever toward impossible stairwells. At the bottom, every thing you ever wanted, bleeding out to nothing. Treacherous crossings marring every voyage. Every boy you ever kissed. Be mindful of teakettle hiss, metal outcroppings. The sudden stop of your own bleating heart.
winter
aries December brings temptation. Strange winds settling in your creaks and hollows. A wall of ice forms beyond the periphery. How you put on clothes, layer by layer and still, you shivered. The river at this point indistinguishable from its banks. Everything white. Everything wild and waiting where the horizon skips over the house. Delivers up a broken stick, a frozen frog. May you unlock every door with your eyes closed. Burn the hours black at your edges.
taurus Whatever you do, don't let fear get its hooks in you. It will look like sadness from a distance, but up close, the monster eats the ground like a blanket. Too many fake Christmas trees and silver tinsel in your hair. Soon, every lake frozen over, fish caught in the shallows. Go deep into winter, deep in the thinning sun. Deep in the house where the mice nest in your left shoe. How they know nothing of winter's ragged claws severing the landscape. Know nothing of death, the sudden snap of carefully laid traps.
gemini You take your chances in the middle of a frozen field, hunting for green where gray has won its course. There are horses, noisy and invisible. Their breath fogging the air around you. Every stick too small to burn. Every click of your pen failing to ignite. Each crack in the landscape sends you plummeting into black. The blank space of this clearing your only hope. How you could lay down right now and snow cover you for weeks, until the ground took you back and released you in spring in a flood of daffodils.
cancer Beware windswept parking lots. The dark yawn between cars. Every newspaper story is another drowning. Another reason your house burns and your nylons run. Winter was something you thought you could get past, without going through. But now, even a book can make you bleed. Can make you wavery at the edges. Heart thundering through your corridors. Listen to the ghosts that insist on hauntin. Rattling the dishes and fogging the mirror. Gather them to you in armfuls, curl softly around them like a cat.
leo By January, the cold takes everything not nailed down. Leaves you hollow and swallowing salt water by the gallon. Off the coast, the water is so gray it fades into sky. You keep tossing offerings into the sea. Watching fish glint in the current, froth the shoreline into frenzy. Easy, how much your limbs can take the cold, casting the old self into the bay and saving her again and again. Letting her float just far enough then reeling her in. You will be troubled and trembling when you emerge, but soon your new skin shines silver in the lamplight. Your new blood sings to sailors and calls the gulls circling on the horizon.
virgo Be aware of inconsistencies. Hallways, doorways, the space between. Morning will slice through you if you let it. Ragged and halfbreathed. Soon, your dogs will be wintered and hungry, but save space for want in the tightest corner of your cabinets. Let the mind go lean with hunger, mean with need. Seed the ground with whatever falls into your palms—stones, shells, the last of the tea. Lead whatever follows you, but be sure to lead it home. Everything animal in you still beating.
libra At the end of the day, the light casts red over floors of darkening apartments. Don't be tricked by lamplight. Everything you need resides in the chest on the floor. The best sunsets those we've thrown offerings into. Four leaf clovers. The bones of a tiny deer. What we fear dangling in the corners of the body like webs. This spell in the language we use, the names we give things before casting them back out into the world. How we catalogued and labeled each and every object. Then threw them, madly, into the freezing river.
scorpio You must begin by building a fire. Burn everything you have that catches. Broken watches, silk scarves, the oak table. If it burns, let it go. Let it lift up over the city like an enormous balloon. Soon, your dreams go white with ghosts, everything you loved collecting in the hollows of your body--collarbones, hipbones, the space behind the ear. Soon, even the trees live inside you, pale outlines on some distant horizon. By spring, you've collected house cats and rabbits and placed them in your chest. Opened the doors and windows so things move freely through you like wind.
sagittarius Below the surface, you are still as a pond. Rounding out your losses and tossing caution into the trees where it gets caught in the branches and sags in the wind. Tread carefully around ravines, bridges, balconies--anything you could topple into or over. This season could bring beauty or rain. The stain of water spreading across your ceiling. It could bring love, the trickiest of precipices, in which you fall into the cracks. The back of your lover's hand some exotic country you've never seen, much less touched. The fear of parking lots and besotted letters, filling up your mailbox and inky with rain.
capricorn For every busted gutter, I give you a garden of bluebells under snow. A paper boat floating awkwardly in a puddle. The riddle of winter is that it's permanent until it's not. Still, whatever you've got hidden in your pockets spills in the street. Do not let the morning go and come back as a question. All answers lead your way down alleys and under stairways thick with spiders, balled into tiny fists in their webs. All questions beating with heat inside your ribs, fogging your windows with rain. The answers themselves questions eating their way toward spring.
pisces Every time you leave, you carry the landscape inside you. Silver fence. Twisted oak. Broken limbs catching the hem of your skirt. It’s everything for the garden, everything for the grave. The cave of your throat a new kind of racket, filled with wheel spokes and tin cans. When you wake in the car, the road rushing toward you, take one long breath in the direction of home and let it go like a note slipping from your fingers. The past burns behind you in the sun, but all he road signs keep their promise. Shake frantically in the wind, but stand.
aquarius Despite the snow, find the source of the river. The force of water tumbling through the body's rocks and muddy bottom. Winter, a rotten tooth, but oh how it sings. Brings dogwood and dandelions to your doorstep. How you kept your heart locked inside all season, but now let it roam in intervals through the woods. The melt that drips from the branches, pools in the low points of the body. What blooms there tangled and ravaged by wind, but sound in its tiny knot.
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