August Horoscopes from Galactic Rabbit

by Gala Mukomolova

Dear late-summer bunnies,

Here is a rabbity poem from Alison Stine!

Imagine what it is like for me
to want you, to wait. Harbinger, rabbit
of the world, red eye flashing as if to warn:
the power that is coming will make no sound.

I hope all of you are staying hydrated, listening for power and dancing under every full moon this season. Me? I am thumping at the chance to share a small piece of poetry with each and every one of you. I hope these meditations find you full-hearted, soft, open, and ready for anything.

-Your Most Galactic Rabbit

Aquarius (Jan 20-Feb 18): Dear Aquarius, I knew a luminous woman once, in my younger years, and she carried your sign. She was good at projecting strength, a kind of proud solitude, a moonlight in her face that I admired. I don’t want to tell you about that solitude or how it often failed her. I’ll tell you, instead, about her heart. How she bit my shoulder one night at a bar and asked “Can’t you feel this?” How I wanted to tell her that what I could and couldn’t feel wasn’t the point. There are moments in our lives when love can’t save us. Not beautiful love and not the love that flesh has for flesh. There will always be months, Aquarius, when your life seems on the brink of bloom or breaking. What others feel around you is only part of your path. There’s also you. Brave, creative, you. In another poem (“The Interpreter”) Alison Stine writes: There are/ not signs for everything, the interpreter/ said when asked if she ever forgot words./ You make them up, get close enough.

Pisces (Feb 19-Mar 20): I did not need technology or a writer to tell me there is chaos in my heart, writes poet Aricka Foreman, and I know you agree. Pisces, whatever waves crash against you and within you, you know intimately. What you might not know (or what you sometimes forget) is that the chaos in your heart lives alongside your healer-self. Honor the alchemist within you, the mad witch stitching grief and pleasure into one human shape. I have felt this coming for a long time, lover, the moment you step off of that tightrope and release your balancing pole. I believe in you. I believe that you are full of gifts you were meant to share with this world. This month, take advantage of Jupiter’s visit to make some big changes and take some necessary risks. You are ready to walk, whole and courageous, forward on your path.

Aries (Mar 21-Apr 19): Doesn’t the close of summer make you just a little wistful? A ball of light curling tightly into itself. How do we encounter the many hours past twilight? asks Dawn Lundy Martin in her poetry collection Discipline. We understand that the light is something other, that it catapults us toward a desire or two if we’re lucky. Aries, soak up the last of these summer nights. Let the pulse of each hour fill you up with its buzzing desire. There is so much we still don’t know about this world: how many planes of existence in concurrence with this one, how many versions of us live at this very moment. Maybe it’s best to leave the mysteries of the universe unsolved. There are ways in which the act of un-defining is a radical act. There are hours past twilight that beckon both the animal and the child in you. You can lay down in the dark field of all your questions: who you’re supposed to be, what time is made of. Under countless winking stars, you might not get the answers you want, but you will get the ones you need.

Taurus (Apr 20-May 20): What do you know about what can’t last, Taurus? What have you learned in these last few months about holding onto what you need and letting the rest go? In her poem “what I mean by ruin is,” Stevie Edwards writes: When you’ve shucked the night with/ the dull blade/ of indecision and gulped down/ everything,/ even the pearls. Have you swallowed too much hoping that something, anything, will cure you? I can’t tell you the rest of the month will be easy. I can’t promise you that, all of a sudden, the strong decisive person you’ve been all your life is the person you will learn to be again. Sweetheart, the journey you are on can’t return you to who you always thought you’d be. What you are moving toward is a self you’ve only begun to imagine. She is waiting for you on the other side of all this ruin.

Gemini (May 21-Jun 20): Dear Twin-star, in her poem “Residency”, Natalie E. Illum writes: Mostly, I look down at my palms,/ notice how fragmented my lifeline is./ The reader told me I have too many/ false starts. She is right./ she tells me to keep only the ones/ with the strongest/ grip. Twinstar, this might be the month you look up from your palms and take in your whole reflection. Who are you without the image of yourself that you’ve constructed? How can you communicate your strengths, your desires? I am thinking of you under a disco ball in a dark bar; there are bodies around you but they are not bodies that you understand. You aren’t looking to understand them. You’re not even looking to dance. Each sliver of refracted mirror light is a touch meant to land on you and bless you gently. You have cast the circle and you are the center of it. This month, revel in whatever makes you beautiful. There will be time, later, to worry about what everyone else sees.

Cancer (Jun 21-Jul 22): In her poem “the gravitational pull of the impossible,” Marty McConnell defines entropy as nobody gets what they want. for the universe to be born,/ six quazillion stars had to die. most nights,/ even the impossible are alone. I am thinking about the entropy in your stars as a disorder in your system. Or, rather, I am thinking that you have spent too many nights trying to organize chaos and give it a name, or a place to sleep. There are wild things, wild energies, that we can’t take care of. Neither can we tame them gently with our love. Sometimes, the best we can do is raise our hands up over our heads and let the whirlwind take us, even if that means going at it alone, even if we don’t get what we think we want. Inside surrender, there are gifts we never anticipated. Claim yours.

Leo (Jul 23-Aug 22): Fire bunnies, once I knew a Leo Fairy Queen named Heather Askeland. We were distant cousins in a sea of women who had come to love each other in times when love was scarcely enough. I knew her only by the bright light her spirit cast and the resilience she held therein. Heather was a music-maker and a poet — incredibly gifted. She was also a Lyme warrior, a woman who spent most of her life in and out of debilitating pain. In her own words, she “cared deeply about people.” Heather left our world at the end of July but she rooted herself in the hearts of many. In the spirit of honoring the life she left, Leo, I’m asking you to take a minute and sit with these lines: Be a shy glance across first date candlelight. Be the sweet/ hours still to unfold. Be wingspan. An eagle never/ underestimates its reach, it must open full to fly.

Virgo (Aug 23-Sep 22): Dear Virgo, while looking for a Virgo poem to share with you, I am upon these lines penned by my dear Leo femmefriend Alysia Angel: the thing about virgos/ who are making art/ is that they can make the world/ sit inside/ boom shakalaka. How perfect, I thought, that a Leo should slip right in and write a poem for you. At midmonth, Mercury, god of direct communication, of asking for what we want, slides from Leo to Virgo. Virgo: a trace of Leo, a lingering kiss, is all you need to push yourself forward. There will be time for being humble, for letting others have the spotlight while you rumble quietly in your power. Even the moon is with you, Virgo, so claim the whole night. Pull the tides in, wreck a sailboat, write that novel and make the world sit and listen to you read it.

Libra (Sep 23-Oct 22): My project is plain persistence, writes Heather June Gibbons, self as spatula/ scraping self as burned crud off skillet… I bet you’re tried of scraping, of making the best out of whatever’s left. Oh Libra, your persistence pays off. Mars is off your back and you are in it to win it. I mean, I don’t know what you’re going to win but I would really like you to win something because you have been such a champion these past few months and champions deserves prizes. Maybe you should put a quarter in one of those claw machines and see if that weird stuffed rhinoceros you’ve been eyeing just comes to you. Or, invest in something more productive, like applying to your dream job or charming your favorite barista. Go out and make some new friends. Have an adventure. It’s fine. Everything.

Scorpio (Oct 23-Nov 21): Dear Scorpio, what if there isn’t any god you were meant to love? What if underneath your human-shell is another human-shell and that’s it? Ordinary. How long do you think you could pretend it was otherwise? I’d like to call this the Scorpio problem: the tension between who we are for others and who we want others to be for us. Scorpio methodologist and poet R. Erica Doyle writes: You hold back enough to keep them curious. Women like that. Wounded enough to be salvageable. Women like that, too. Fixing things. Take in the broken wing you drag like a decoy. But, what if the only trick you are pulling is the one you keep pulling on yourself? The one where you always think that you know how to leave, have all the proper exits marked, and you are wrong. The one who is most vulnerable is usually the one who reads as the least, remember that, Black-heart, remember it or lose again.

Sagittarius (Nov 22-Dec 21): Look at the field, writes Ali Shapiro, the way/ there’s no one else in it, the way/ even now, having left you,/ I’m still what’s left. Sagittarius, this is a love poem for you the way that all of life could be filled with love poems for you, poems wherein you stand firmly at the center of your own sadness and hold it without artifice or resentment in your hands. Archer, I have seen you bend your bow and string your arrow. The only thing I can’t make out is what you’re aiming for. Make sure that your target is what you want and not what you wish you wanted. Look at the field — which is the field of your life or at least one of your lives. Is it verdant? Can you find everything you need — can you find sustenance? Maybe it’s an empty field. Maybe your lover is there with you or the shadow of the lover you thought you left. It doesn’t matter. If you’re what’s left, Sagittarius, are you enough?

Capricorn (Dec 22-Jan 19): A dear friend and mentor of mine named Rachel McKibbens wrote a poem for her “Last Love” once. She dedicated the poem to her daughters. Within the lines of the poem she encourages them to go with the one who can pull us out of ourselves until we are no longer sisters/ or daughters or sword swallowers but, instead,/ women who give and lead and take and want/ and want and want and want,/ because there is no shame in wanting. Do these words strike you as familiar? Do they resemble the call you have felt in your own heart? Let me repeat it to you again, sweet sea-goat, there is no shame in wanting. So, as the summer closes and the heat of the sun curls the days up into shorter and shorter hours, I urge you to tend to the desirous animal within you. What has she wanted all of this time? What have you denied her?

Gala Mukomolova is a poet ruled by Pluto, a planet in our hearts.

Photo via Leezie/Flickr