scorpio season

These poems are rough, at such a tender time. I've kept the somatic practice of cupping the hands into a bowl to externalize pain, and replaced the poem on the practice video with a poem of peace by Aurora Levins Morales. Trigger warning that "Summons" might also bring up stuff for you, so please, as always, take CARE of yourself and feel free to get off at your bus stop. Sending strength in this crazy time.

Aurora Levins Morales, "Summons"
Last night I dreamed
ten thousand grandmothers
from the twelve hundred corners of the earth
walked out into the gap
one breath deep
between the bullet and the flesh
between the bomb and the family.
They told me we cannot wait for
governments.
There are no peacekeepers boarding planes.
There are no leaders who dare to say
every life is precious, so it will have to be us.
They said we will cup our hands around each
heart.
We will sing the earth’s song, the song of
water,
a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn
to weeping.
The mourners will embrace, and grief replace
every impulse toward harm.
Ten thousand is not enough, they said,
so, we have sent this dream, like a flock of
doves
into the sleep of the world. Wake up. Put on
your shoes.
You who are reading this, I am bringing
bandages
and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I
think
I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner.
Let’s go.

Dion Lissner O’Reilly, “Scavenged”

what becomes
of us once we’ve been torn apart
and returned to our future…
Dorianne Laux
 
When I was nineteen, a flame clung to my back,
ate me to the spine. Torch-lit and alone,
I ran through the house, a contagion
cindering couches and carpets.
Flayed, my fingertips peeled back
to the nail beds. My spongy tissues touched air,
light, and the steel cot where they took me.
 
Each day, they peeled me
like Velcro from my sheets,
left bits of my meat there.
Lowered me into Betadine,
scrubbed me to screams--
that became my history. Scavenged
by the curious. They see my twisted fingers
and are hungry for the tale.
 
I’ve done the same, stared
at a leg’s nubbed end, wanted to touch it,
feel the cut bone under the knob,
hear its shrapnel story. I wanted to know
how that man was alive, arms glistening
playing basketball from a high-tech chair,
making his shots.
 
The body’s scarred terrain becomes
consecrated field. We gather to pick
through the pieces that remain--
an ear hanging from its hinge of skin,
diamond stud in the lobe, ring finger
shining with its promise-band of gold.

Dion Lissner O’Reilly “Scavenged” from Ghost Dogs. Copyright © 2020 by Dion O’Reilly. Used by permission of Terrapin Books.
 
 
Marion Wrenn, “Firebird”
 
I’m the girl who smelled of kerosene
 
& candy, who, once                supine in a treefort
 
& already forgetting               the damp magazines
 
slick with women                    the jinxed shag carpet
 
under bucket seats pried from a junked Camaro,
 
boys watching the boy on top of me,
 
was unthinking                       breath that would be kisses,
 
the pressure of a body & mine
 
a fulcrum:       of course—     of course
 
I can still feel a finger on my philtrum.
 
An angel whispers plunk & I keep quiet,
 
cleaving          & knowing      not to ask or tell,
 
unwilling to risk          turning my mother to ash,
 
trusting only    my strength     to hold tight.
 
Marion Wrenn, “Firebird” copyright © 2022 by Marion Wrenn. Reprinted by permission of the poet.
 
 
Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari”

v.
Thick coat. Black fur. Two russet horns
twisted to stone. One night
I was stuck on a narrow road,
  panting.
I was pregnant.
I was dead.
I was a fetus.
  I was just born.
(Most days
I don’t know what I am).
I am a photograph
  of a saint, smiling.
For years, my whole body ran
away from me. When I flew--charred--
through the air, my ankles and toes fell off
  onto the peaks of impassable mountains.
I have to go back
to that wet black thing
dead in the road. I have to turn around.
  I must put my face in it.
It is my first time.
I would not have it any other way.
I am a valley of repeating
  verdant balconies.
 
Robin Coste Lewis, “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari” from The Voyage of the Sable Venus: And Other Poems by Robin Coste Lewis, copyright © 2015 by Robin Coste Lewis. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopt, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            I’m no astrology master, but as a Scorpio Rising, I feel I can say the attributes of this sign are uncomfortably intense. Scorpios like to get right down to the bottom of things, without necessarily driving at the speed of trust. I’ve never felt from the inside the watery aspects of Scorpios; hanging out with one is like being held to a flame, and being one is like... well... it’s like being fire. So I’d like to issue a trigger warning for these poems, which touch wounds that many of you may prefer not to poke and prod. But as the #MeToo movement showed, spitting out the stories we were all taught to choke down and swallow does hold potential for transforming the culture at large. If we want change, now is the moment to hold ourselves and one another to the fire. Maybe we can burn off what doesn’t serve.
            The progress of O’Reilly’s brutal poem “Scavenged” is as straightforward as it is generous. The first half is about the excruciating pain of being, essentially, burned alive. The second half hinges this unusual personal story to the shared morbid curiosity we all feel about other human wounds, our shared hunger for one another’s darkest stories. And the poem arrives, finally, by declaring all of us, our scarred living remains, sacred: our flesh is depicted as a “consecrated field” spangled in diamonds and gold.
            The kerosene girl of “Firebird” endures a more metaphorical, and more common, manner of scorching. The setting is like a movie rendition of ’80s Americana: a kid’s tree fort, damp magazines (ew) dating back to a pre-digital age, bucket seats pried from a Camaro, and the shag carpet, jinxed. The superstitions of the scene reflect the times, when we used to play with Ouija boards and ceremoniously lift one another’s as-if-dead bodies in the game “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.” The plunk-whispering angel and the near-beatific Firebird (almost identical to a Camaro) wrap in dark magic the unspoken rule “not to ask or tell.” Here the code of silence ensures that the speaker’s mother won’t be turned to ash, kind of like “step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” This is a telling reversal of the phoenix theme: nobody is going to rise from the ash in a circle of horny onlookers. The only thing to be trusted is the survivor’s “strength to hold tight,” minimizing the orbit of harm to a tight circle of one. Like you do with a fire.
            So, returning to the question from O’Reilly’s epigraph: “…what becomes / of us once we’ve been torn apart?” I think of the “torch-lit” girl in O’Reilly’s poem, “cindering couches and carpets,” the bits of her meat left on the sheets. A nightmare inverse of the phoenix is the myth of Parvati, a goddess whose punishment for immodesty is to be charred, dismembered, and scattered across the valley that bears her name. One of the purported sites where Parvati’s charred body parts fell from the sky is the setting for Robin Coste Lewis’ long poem “On the Road to Sri Bhuvaneshwari.” Zinging around this poem are the subtle crosscurrents of power and violence at work in South Asian tourism, not only in the scarred aftermath of British colonial conquest, but in Indian culture and mythology itself.
        The poem depicts an African American woman and a group of American college students traveling down the dark mountain, where they encounter a nomadic clan with a herd of water buffalo, one of which is giving birth. This is all taking place, we have to remember, at the very site of the self-immolation of the goddess of fertility. When the baby turns out to be stillborn, the tribe ropes the mother buffalo, holding her down until she looks directly at the dark fur of her dead offspring. She finally gives up and stops bucking, to put her nose down in the “folded and wet black nothing.” The buffalo’s suffering overlaps associatively with the speaker’s own childbirth experience, and she describes feeling drawn back to the corpse: “I have to turn around. / I must put my face in it.” By the end of the poem, the speaker has a kind of clarity born from clear witness—of the bereaved mother animal, the charred goddess falling in pieces, the fetus, death, the smiling saint, the valley itself. The shadow work of Scorpio season beckons us all past the surface to dive down into our own darkness and history, put our face in the hard thing. It’s a form of consecration.
 
 
PRACTICE
            If you’re down for some down-and-dirty shadow work, this is the week for it. If you are a menstruating woman, you could dive into the Parvati theme and scatter your blood as an earth offering. Or, if it’s your thing, you could make art out of it or ritual marks on your skin. You could study roadkill if you happen to pass it; that’s an ancient meditation. But maybe the true Scorpio practice would be to go back to a time you were wounded, if and only if you feel you can trust your strength to hold tight. Dr. Sarà King teaches a practice of holding pain. Nothing could be simpler: the practitioner simply holds their cupped hands, like a little bowl or container, in front of their chest. Could you hold your wound in this way or hold your body where it has been wounded, as a way of giving it a place that’s separate from you and also as a way of caring for it and, symbiotically, caring for you? What is the associative web of thoughts and feelings?