Don’t Worry Darling, Part Three (I Ruin Every Party)

 

Alexis Bledel On Madmen. All the pop culture Prismas!

In Victory, if you start seeing through your hypnosis, you have to be removed or electric shocked into submission. (Just like Rory Gilmore was that time she was on Mad Men. Fucking Pete.) It’s not good enough to apologize and try to obey, try to fit in, try to follow the script you’ve been given. You have to sacrifice either your life or your memories for the men of Victory to properly feel the confidence, worth, and control they’ve paid for.

The littlest disturbance in the illusion they’re creating has to be snuffed out before it can spread.

In 2008, my then-wife and I were at a family birthday party for my second-littlest cousin. We were playing the family’s favorite game, Encore! wherein you pick a card with a word or theme and sing songs back and forth in teams.

Maybe the word was “kissed” because someone, maybe me, started singing “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry. (OHBOY the queasy-cute aughts version of bi visibility! See also the movie Jennifer’s Body, from the same year.) My first-littlest cousin, maybe six at the time, said “That song is disgusting.”

And, though I hadn’t yet developed my eerily calm teacher voice, I think I was pretty chill when I said “You never know who might be around when you say something like that.”

And my brother, sitting across the gameboard from me, LOST HIS MIND. He was INCENSED with me for saying something so political. I don’t remember what his words were, but they were SPAT.

When I asked him to talk outside and told him to please not treat me with so much contempt, I wasn’t that articulate but I was still pretty calm. Until he said the following:

“You ruin every party.”

(To which Thanksgiving 2016 me could have responded: “Hold my pie.”)

Further back, when I was away on the West Coast, my mom said “We’re so much happier without you.”

Even further back, when I was a little kid and the parents were fighting and my mom told me “This is your fault. I wouldn’t have had to marry him if it wasn’t for you.”

For some reason, the mom ones don’t hurt as much as the brother ones (Though apparently, I do carry them around like rotten treasures.) I identify with my mom’s ability to say the cruelest, stupidest thing when angry and flustered.

But my brother’s contempt is so measured, so purposeful, so sure of its righteousness. It feels like hurting me is a first aid kit he keeps. Like putting me in my place is the surest way to safety, a roadmap, a prayer. It doesn’t matter as much if his world is disrupted if he knows his place in it, above me.

Don’t Worry Darling: Being Chaos, Part One

 

***Spoilers ahead!***

***Content warning—gaslighting, immobilization, all things patriarchy***

When the masterminds of Victory are training their housewives, they hypnotize and re-hypnotize them with images of women in synchronized movement, they even, inside the cute prison cul-de-sac of the mind they’ve created, require dance classes to teach them to move together in frictionless harmony. Instead of overtly espousing red pill/incel grievance, the leader talks about order. The Don’t Worry Darling vision of order helps me understand some things, both political and personal.

The Victory men aim to attain this order by literally immobilizing and silencing women and by convincing them they are happy in a pretty, refined, and regressive reality, looking beautiful (My KINGDOM for Florence Pugh’s floral housedress!) and serving the men. The simulation is classic Stepford Wives, where men go off to “important jobs” and women stay home and make perfect roasts. No one really eats or (At least I really hope!) physically fucks. It’s a (nonconsensual for women) happiness machine for a specific, shallow kind of happiness, one that gives helpless- and worthless-feeling men a sense of control and worth.

There’s a scene toward the end. Shortly before Florence breaks though and wakes up, where we flash back to her alone in her living room, just kind of singing and dancing around and being herself. She’s moving her body the way she likes, a moment of privacy and inner joy.

That moment helps me understand what feels so threatening to the real-life gender-policing white supremacist patriarchy—joy that THEY don’t specifically provide or oversee makes them feel like some levee has broken, like some force has overflowed and become a threat.

I still don’t understand why us having our own thoughts, rhythms, choices feels so threatening to them, but I’ve read On Tyranny a couple times and I think it’s just that: creeping, defensive tyranny. It feels us waking up, breaking free, and it wants nothing more than for us to shut up, be still, settle down into a reality they alone create.

The “they” here is I don’t know who. Tyranny and patriarchy steal everyone’s freedom, but I guess not everybody believes that. I guess maybe they (again, I’m only sort of sure who that is) think that if they can silence us (and who, also, is us?) make us be still and obey, then they’ll have a thing they’ll call freedom? No one would tell them that they said the wrong words or bother them with the pesky fact that democracy is in danger.

Oh, I see. Democracy is the opposite of being frozen in someone else’s reality. It’s agency, however vexingly slight. It’s movement and progress and disagreement and struggle, the furthest thing from being still. It’s not a synchronized dance routine, it’s kind of a mosh pit. Or a march. Or a Philadelphia victory parade.

Screaming at the Supreme Court: A Love Story (Part One)

If you're wondering how to manage/use/deploy your lady-rage (or even, dreamy guy allies, your on-behalf-of-ladies rage!) this book is one thousand therapy sessions. If you're in Philly, call the Big Blue Marble. https://www.bigbluemarblebooks.com/

It was a last-minute decision to go. On Friday night, October 5, Amy and I were watching Murphy Brown, newly rebooted and excoriating the fictional White House Press Corps. We were scrolling through our feeds and seething as the “on the fence” votes changed to Kavanaugh votes. I was double-seething because my “friends” on social media seemed to think that Susan Collins was the ONLY person to blame.

“I think we have to go,” I said, and I looked around on my facebook until I found the Flood the Capitol March, lead by the Women’s March and Planned Parenthood Action. I already had a sign I’d made for an anti-Kavanaugh rally we’d attended a few weeks before in Philly.

It didn’t feel like the other protests. As I cleaned the house, rearranged my Saturday plans, and went to bed early, I didn’t have as much power-to-the-people hopefulness buoying me up. Instead, I was SEETHING, so frustrated to still be doing this work, decades after my own rape experiences and millennia after women were enslaved. IT HAS NEVER NOT BEEN THIS.

Since I became politically active, this blog has often been about convincing people that protesting and other political work could be nice, friendly, loving, inclusive, and all of those things are true. But in the past few weeks, I have become less and less willing to perform polite, feminine, hopeful organizing and more willing to give voice to the feral fury that sometimes makes me feel out of control. Getting ready to Flood the Capitol, I felt almost none of my usual aren’t-humans-amazing feelings. It was more a feeling of “Survivors, let’s burn it down.”

For professional reasons, I’m hesitant to be honest about the fury. Because I work with children, it’s important for me to feel nurturing, loving, and safe. My clients and their families deserve a solid, peaceful presence in their lives, so I feel guilty to also be this raging, scary thing. But at the same time, it’s love, nurturing, and protectiveness—for myself (both adult and inner traumatized child), for my nieces and nephews, for the fear that my students, mostly children of color, will face in a future with Kavanaugh on the bench.

            As Amy and I drove Washingtonward at way-too-early-on-a-Saturday-o’clock, we decided: No getting arrested. The priority was to get safely back to the students, to not miss a single tutoring hour. As much as I admire those who get arrested (Later in the day I would sob watching a young woman have a panic attack as the handcuffs went on.) I knew my priorities were elsewhere. 

Victimhood Isn’t Shameful, Permanent, or Absolute

Fuck Tony Robbins. When he literally, physically pushed a woman repeatedly to prove that she was hurting herself with her #metoo anger and “victim mentality,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmkiqfmobqI the world (or at least the world that shares my algorithms) was horrified, and he was indeed a terrible monster, but he was also pushing a belief that runs throughout all throughout pop psychology. Even though a crime happened to us, a terrible act of aggression and chaos that may have (or may not have!) jarred our lives onto a new course, we are not allowed to call ourselves victims. (Except Roxane Gay. She said at the beginning of Hunger that she doesn’t feel like she owes the world a heroic narrative, and it was SUCH a relief to read that sentiment.)

Watching Tony Robbins be a gaslighting creep onstage reminded me of the time (Waaaaaay before I’d ever thought about trauma work or survivorship or PTSD) my poor Aunt Melinda accidentally sent me to triggertown by quoting another pop psychology patriarch: Dr. Phil. “You teach people how to treat you,” she said, frustrated after listening to a relatively minor tale of roommate woe. I was speechless with anger, feeling the weight of every abuse I’d even been blamed (or blamed myself) for. I’m sure I said nothing helpful or articulate. I still feel the weight of that rage, that mute fury, but luckily there’s blogs and Twitter and being a street artist now, so I find the words. I’ll be finding the words for the rest of my life.

***PLEASE NOTE*** My beautiful anxiety brain is about to take us on a journey, in several leaps, from my personal trauma to the global trauma of history. I don’t equate my trauma to ANYONE else’s. This paragraph is to show the way my trauma helps connect me to the other much more serious pains of the world, and how gaslighting and victim-blaming helps perpetuate the smallest harms and the largest.***

I have never been able to separate “You teach people how to treat you,” from “you were asking for (rape, abuse, terror, etc.)” Did I somehow “teach” the group of teens who drugged, conspired to rape, and assaulted me that that was the kind of treatment I deserved? Did Trayvon Martin TEACH George Zimmerman that he deserved to die, or was that CENTURIES OF COLONIALISM, WHITE SUPREMACY, AND NRA INFLUENCE? For that matter, did the nations and cultures that were colonized, tortured, and sometimes even erased by Europe “teach us” that they wanted to be dominated and oppressed? No. We dominated and oppressed them because we wanted to. That’s what abusers do.

Aside from the abusive aspect of victimhood-stigmatizing, we do it to ourselves as well. God forbid I should accidentally call myself a “victim” instead of a “survivor” in a feminist thread—I’d be accused of demeaning myself and others, but why? Why should it be demeaning to admit that something bad has happened to us? (I’m worried that I’m accidentally plagiarizing Roxane Gay here. Seriously, read everything she’s ever written.)

I think it comes back to an ancient and stultifying thread of magical thinking. To calm the chaos of the world around us, humans still believe deep down that if something bad happens to you, you must be bad. On that idea is built every atrocity, every erased voice, every abuse from personal to global. Because of that magical thinking, we suffer instead of getting treated, we are pressured to perform heroic survivorship or at least general okayness, we try to empower ourselves with self-blame, we shut off every tributary of empathy. I was seriously once told by an opponent of Obamacare that I got hit by a car in the crosswalk because having insurance invited injury. That is how desperate people are to find order by placing blame, but why not place it on, I DON’T KNOW, the person who was driving?!

If we’re hurt, we must be bad, and if we care for the hurt, we just invite more badness, goes the magical thinking. Teaching the Universe how to treat us. Primal. Understandable, maybe, but the root of every violence and oppression.

Because I’ve had a bajillion years of cognitive behavioral therapy, I can occasionally question my own false absolutes, the labels we place on ourselves and others that can obscure the bigger picture. A few weeks ago, a teenage white supremacist facebook troll told me that minorities should “let go of (our/their) victimhood and be stronger.” He was wrong on every level and I told him why, but his ignorance helped make something clear for me: Victimhood can’t change anyone’s value—why would it? How could a thing that happened to us reduce our worth? A trauma or oppression may change our outlook, it may give us new insights and growth, or it may not. Victimhood may change us, but I don’t think I ever realized before, it isn’t us. The things that happened to me are not the same as what I am. (Pause for two decades of therapists to rejoice.)

The crimes and oppressions that influence us, our various forms of victimhood are not fixed or permanent. Engaging with them doesn’t make us worse or invite more misfortune. Recognizing the ways I am oppressed doesn’t take away my power, it gives me more. Understanding the obstacles that I and my fellow humans face can burnish us to alchemist’s gold, help us change the world, or just help us empathize with our own shitty/miraculous fate as we head off to conquer another day.

If I could take away one idea from the world’s consciousness, it would be the idea that if something bad happens to you, you must deserve it. It’s a toxic, rotten, compelling idea, a holdover from the time when we believed that illness came from demons, that misfortune must reveal some secret sin. It would be especially be good to get rid of this idea because THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO DO THE BAD THINGS! WHERE IS THE COMFORT IN BLAMING THE VICTIMS INSTEAD?

While we work on eradicating victim-blaming, I’m happy to be a little more free of victim-shaming, to see trauma as a shifting influence, survivorship as multifarious and not something at which I have to be amazing. It reminds me of when my BFF/ex-wife were watching Kesha’s Grammy Performance  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buM8OErfvu0 and Amy, eyes full of tears at Kesha’s monumental, beautiful, grumpy transcendence said “She’s too nice!”

“It’s only one song on the album,” I said, and that’s how I feel about all of this. Kesha’s survivorship is a diamond-brilliant facet of her artistic identity, but so is her goofiness, her feverish dance beats, her sly romance. For anyone to reduce her or the #metoo movement to stigmatized victimhood is only to see a very, very narrow part of the picture. Everything I make will be an attempt to break that narrow lens.

Things That Made 2016 a Life-Changing Summer: Part Two

The Fourth of July! I didn’t get to do much in June, and with the broken-arm grief it sometimes felt like all was lost, but when we drove up to my sister’s for Independence Day, summer started to light up the way it’s supposed to. Watching the Oswego parade with my sister and niece and nephews gave me such a feeling of childhood joy combined with grown-up patriotism and progress—the parade even included a giant rainbow flag and ladies dressed as suffragettes!

In between fireworks, (both the mom-lit and city-provided varieties) swimming, and red-white- and-blue “Patriotic!” cookies, my nephews asked a million political questions and I showed them how to use the candidates’ issues pages so they could learn all the points themselves. Holden really hates fracking and Kieran told me that whenever he has a substitute teacher, the class asks who he or she is voting for. My niece is the youngest person in her school’s Acceptance Coalition, so they give me more hope for the future than anything else.

Helping Open the Neighborhood’s PA Democrats’ Office! This is where I felt the most at home this summer. Whether I was calling to ask people to volunteer, making art to hang on the walls, or hearing the entire headquarters sing “Happy Birthday” to Amy, I felt a sense of love, inclusion, and purpose—I felt most welcome to be myself. There are only (thank goodness!) 71 days to go ‘til election day, but I’m hoping to serve Planned Parenthood in some way after this, so hopefully the love will keep inspiring me.

The Filibuster and Sit-In! After Orlando, it was hard to deal with the fact that friends and family didn’t always see the personal nature of the tragedy, the implications of such a large-scale massacre of LGBT people. When Chris Murphy, John Lewis, and Nancy Pelosi lead our lawmakers to really take a stand for gun control, it felt like such a relief, like oh, thank goodness, someone sees us. After decades of being ignored and/or vilified by my own government,  I’m grateful that public opinion and grassroots activism has given Washington the push and the permission to take a stand for LGBT people in so many ways, even if there’s still a long way to go. Also, sending thank-you tweets to the sit-inners and tweeting vigil pictures at Paul Ryan was pretty fun.

My West Wing Rewatch and Hamilton Obsession! Though I certainly favor either/or thinking that leans fully to the left, the West Wing has helped me to understand progress as a long game, and one that is peopled by public servants who, as Brené Brown would say, are doing the best they can. As much as I am a raging partisan, it heled me to see that even when Paul Ryan is forgetting what the fuck a gavel is for, is probably doing what he thinks is best for the public good. It feels healthier to me to believe that everyone, especially on the blue team, is really fighting hard to do the most possible good. I get that the West Wing is fiction, but it’s just such great counterpoint to my depression-brain.

Hamilton, besides providing the “How lucky we are to be alive right now!” of it all, (And another awesome way to bond with the niece and nephews!) helped me to understand why we HAVE partisan politics, why conflict and vehement disagreement are as much part of our values and freedom and inclusion are/should be.

I feel extremely dorky and sometimes freakish for believing in these things, but it’s just a nice way to see the world. If I didn’t believe that I could be a genuine part of progress, I don’t know how I’d ever get out from under the injustices I’ve seen.

Thank You Thursdays: Favorite Podcast

No matter what mood I'm in or what kind of day I'm having, Again With This: Beverly Hills 90210 Edition always brings me to my happy place: the Nineties. Full of sassy descriptions of shoulder-paddy fashion, (there are visual aids too) Twin Peaks references, it gives me (somewhat disturbing) insights about how the show shaped my adolescent brain. 

Plus, it's a spinoff of my other favorite cavalcade of pop culture goodness, Extra Hot Great.

Thanks shows!

Talking With My Childhood Self About Bill Cosby

Photo by my Uncle Steve

Before I get to the soul searching, I want to say that I think Hannibal Buress is a hero for bringing the reality Bill Cosby’s victims into the public consciousness, but I really wish that women were taken as seriously on the same set of topics—Jen Kirkman has been censored and Julie Klausner vilified for pointing out similar allegations  and hypocrisies, (about Louis C. K. and R. Kelly respectively) and I would very much like to live in a world that isn’t trained to dismiss women’s point of view, especially on this particular matter.

For a lot of my adult life, I’ve been a trusting, open, jump-in-with-both-feet kind of person. I made friends and became devoted to them instantly (okay, I still do that) got crushes on poets and wrote reams about them, greeted nearly every person and new situation wholeheartedly.  I’ve never been afraid to walk alone at night and I’m still not, but in the past few years, I’ve ended up seeing the world through rape-colored glasses, seeing facets of coercion and exploitation everywhere. The problem with this lens is not that it isn’t true, but that it isn’t helpful; it’s not taking me where I want to go.

I want to slay those dragons and really start to live knowing I have agency and hope. The personal reasons that I tend to see the world this way are well-documented; they’re private and complex, but the psychological impact, the pulling-the-rug out-from-under-me that Cosby-as-rapist has wrought matters.

Like probably so many little girls, I LOVED Bill Cosby. This is not an overstatement like “Oh, I love Netflix,” but real, abject human love of a child for an adult man who seemed more than deserving of that love. My dad had all of his records and my brother and sister and I listened to them so much that it was almost like we were the siblings in those stories.

But The Cosby Show. It was one of the few shows we were allowed to watch—somehow that Thursday night block was highbrow enough for my dad (who before long would give into the slippery slope of Growing Pains and Perfect Strangers) (Mike Seaver didn’t do much in the not-letting-me-down department either, did he?) so we watched it as a family every Thursday night, like everyone.

Was there ever a more appealing paragon of manhood than Cliff Huxtable? He danced with his wife. He goofed around with the kids. He lovingly and hilariously laid down the law when necessary. And sometimes, as I think was pointed out once on Community, an entire episode could be about making a sandwich with his daughter. He was a perfect picture of what it means to be a man in a family, exactly the beautiful grownup my ten-year-old self needed.

There are a lot of factors that combine to make me generally skittish, but the shift from what I felt about Cosby then to what I know now exacerbates the feeling I have sometimes that if I relax for one second, if I trust for one second, the world will turn upside down and I will be completely fucked. But I certainly don’t want to approach the world that way.

So.

Dear Little Self,

What you loved was a story, and that story is still true. Everywhere there are families with singing and laughing—you’ve lived in one for a long time. Everywhere there are men, dads and brothers and friends and strangers who wish you and everyone nothing but love, safety and happiness.

You can grieve for Cliff Huxtable and be mad that Kurt Cobain was such a creep to that girl in high school and still be pretty peeved about that one episode of Buffy. I will always be mad with you and on your behalf. I will always be on your side.

But let’s look for other, better examples, and allow them to be true. I’ll do my best to keep you safe, if you’ll do your best to let it go. Take all the time you need.

Love,

Grownup You

Song of The Week: Good Enough to Reopen the Blog. :)

I've been wondering what to do with my writing self now that I ran out of adventures (or rather, of wanting to have them) for my naughty blog. Then I scrolled past this on my morning facebook dawdling and remembered how much fun it was to be a pop culture blogger. Thank heaven for moments of transcendence in between games of Bejeweled.

Poetic License Horoscope for March 4-10

 ***I'm excited to announce that the horoscopes have another new home this week: Apiary! Thanks to Lillian  and the rest of the beautifuls over there for always including me in their fun.

Pisces (Feb. 20-March 20): Things to do while you’re waiting for the next season of Portlandia: Memorize famous bridges. Send lavish bouquets to Aimee Mann. Listen to Sleater-Kinney records backwards, for the hidden messages. Remember your mantra: Put birds on things. Put birds on things. Put birds on things.


Aries (March 21-April 18): The stars told me to tell you that Ira Glass is your guardian angel. He watches over everything you do, asking thoughtful questions and moving the story forward in such a patient, soothing voice.

Taurus (April 19-May 18): “The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are.” (Walt Whitman) Etch that into your mirror, paint it on your coffee cups, write it in the middle of your palms for luck.

Gemini (May 19-June 21): I like Steve Carell’s character in Dinner for Schmucks. He loves his ex-wife so much that he makes her a whole parkscape diorama. Peopled with little dressed-up taxidermied mice, but still, endearing!

Cancer (June 22-July 23): Dress optimistically, even if it means your ears might get cold. Show your faith with just-light-enough sweaters. Believe it’s warm out until you touch the window pane.

Leo (July 24-Aug. 23): Last night as I was snuggled up, reading in bed with my sweetie, she with her Wonder Woman graphic novel and I with my Bitch magazine, I thought, “This is exactly what I always hoped for.” Be prepared for similarly snuggly revelations.

Virgo (Aug. 24-Sept. 23): “Love the music our beatbox bodies loop over sunrises. /Love the soft spots we leave for each other.”(Elliott D. Smith) The whole Universe is waking up next to you, blinking its eyes, with swoony thoughts and fancy plans.

Libra (Sept. 24-Oct. 21): Last week when I was freaking out about an upcoming math test, my tutor pal came over to help me. Even though he only stayed for an hour and most of that hour was spent on gossip, he helped me to improve my score by 14 questions worth of points. Someone’s waiting to work that kind of magic for you.

Scorpio (Oct. 22-Nov. 22): Hooray for Barb on Big Love! She’s realizing that she can have access to the divine without a man’s intercession! Sister-wife, listen more to your inner Margene, and less to your inner Nicki.

Sagittarius (Nov. 23-Dec. 22):Last time my nephew Holden visited, he was very, very disappointed that he could not give a cheeseburger to either of our cats. But as for you, in the words of T.I. as paraphrased by Lolcats: you can haz whatever you like.

Capricorn (Dec. 23-Jan. 20): I unsubscribed to my previously favorite podcast after the host made me cry on Twitter. Maybe we don’t need to interact with everything we love, or maybe we just have to keep trying. #stillalittlebrokenhearted

Aquarius (Jan. 21-Feb. 19): Like a ghost in a library, you have access to everything, but need help turning the pages. What little winds can come along and flutter you forward? Maybe an Aries can lend you her guardian angel?

Poetic License Horoscopes is a free syndicated series which appears weekly on such lit blogs as The Serotonin Factory, Critical Mass and The Legendary and Apiary If you are interested in adding the Poetic License Horoscopes to your lit journal / lit blog, please email me at serotoninfactory@gmail.com.

Friday Love Poems: Scott Beal!

Scott Beal is one of my favorite friends that I haven’t met yet. We became pals through the magic of 30/30 (Every April! Everyone writes and posts a poem a day! It’s like poetry Christmas. Is it weird that I’m already excited?), exchanged mixes, and now we’re poetry pals 4life.

Relationship Tips from Us Weekly

I could use a deep slice from the lid of a cat

food can to bring home how I hate working

with one good hand to stanch the screw-up

of the other. I need to lose a pint

of beer into the disposal to show my throat

how to work through its thirst. A better vandalism

to inhabit my bathroom and punch out the mirror

I’ve fogged to blindness practicing apologies on,

and burglars to fence the shards back to me

as gems. A canteen to lug over dunes

between the couch and the bed after my mouth

meaning to speak softly has again spit sand

from my grinding teeth. I need to teach

my throat to swallow in the midst

of your magazine story I have worked so hard

to edit myself out of and once the cats are fed

back into.

Relationship Tips from Leviticus

“If a man lies with a woman and there is an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe in water and be unclean until the evening." ―Leviticus 15:18

Miss, I believe we've had an emission.
Yep.
A fine mess this is.

I'll perform the prescribed purifying rites
on the sheets while you draw the bath,
though water will not be enough, water
is merely a way to start the clock
for our uncleanness to lift by evening.
So you might as well add bubbles
to the bath, and bring the luscious sponge,
and bring the Penthouse Forum and the rest
of that merlot. And before we venture
forth and multiply the gestures and flows
that landed us here, let us toast
the implausible success of the author

of every letter that begins “I never thought
this could happen to me,” the miracle
arriving despite his lack of faith.

Scott Beal’s poems have appeared recently in Indiana Review, Dunes Review, The Legendary, and in a split book with Rachel McKibbens and Aracelis Girmay entitled Jangle the Threads (Red Beard Press, 2010). His first chapbook, Two Shakespearean Madwomen vs. the Detroit Red Wings, was published in 1999 by White Eagle Coffee Store Press. He earned his MFA in 1996 from the University of Michigan.  He teaches poetry and fiction workshops at the Neutral Zone (Ann Arbor's teen center) and serves as Dzanc Writer-in-Residence at Ann Arbor Open School.

https://www.spokenwordredux.com/index.php?option=com_poet&task=detail&id=PDB873&Itemid=68

Spring Fever Mix Tape: Poetic License Horoscopes

***This week's springtastic picture comes from my sister, Katie Carter, who is my favorite photographer!***

Poetic License Horoscope for February 18-24

Spring Fever Mix Tape


Aquarius (Jan. 21-Feb. 19): Write About Love (Belle and Sebastian): Whatever cubicle nightmare is glitter-hazing your head, your heart needs some fresh air. Go outside and get sunbeams on your face. Map the snowmelt rivers, or better yet, follow them.

Pisces (Feb. 20-March 20): (Portland, Oregon) You’re My Home (Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen): “We’re so thankful for everything we’ve got, and we’re so sorry for everything we’re not.” Except that you never have to apologize. Your heart is as bountiful as a Portland food truck. You are the opposite of an ironic mustache. Like the Rose City, your aim is true.

Aries (March 21-April 18): The Cave (Mumford and Sons): “The sun, it rises slowly as you walk/ Away from all the fears/ And all the faults you've left behind.” You are now leaving Plato’s cave. Things aren’t shadows anymore, they’re three-dimensional.


Taurus (April 19-May 18): Firework (Glee Cast Version): Everyone has come to the field and spread out their blankets as the blue fades from the sky and the stars appear. They’re waiting for you with a soundtrack of sighs. You are only for special occasions, only for glimmering across their upturned faces.

Gemini (May 19-June 21): The Suburbs (Arcade Fire): Things may seem end-of-the-worldy, but a lot of it plans to stick around, I promise. Ride bikes around like little kids. Take out your camera and record every angle of your living sight. Have faith in the horizon, and even in the cul-de-sac.

Cancer (June 22-July 23): Animal (Miike Snow): You shapeshifter, mixing your signals, fading in and out like a pulse. You can decide what you are on any highway. “Now you’re pulling your disguise up. Are you free or are you tied up?”

Leo (July 24-Aug. 23): Home (LCD Soundsystem) and Home (The Magnetic Zeroes): Get there and stay there, or carry it with you. Everything you hope for is stacked up around your ears. Remember your best friend is your breath, and most importantly: come back, come back, come back.

Virgo (Aug. 24-Sept. 23): El Scorcho (Weezer): Somebody is always reading your diary, decoding the heart-doodles in the margins. Follow love with or without mistranslation, whether or not you are even legible. Send out sparks like homing beacons, it’s okay for now, the waiting.

Libra (Sept. 24-Oct. 21): You Can Do It (Ice Cube): You are my very own living room dance party, and this is encouragement you can trust. “Don’t stop, git it git it.” You will.

Scorpio (Oct. 22-Nov. 22):  Touch the Sky (Kanye West): “Any pessimists I ain't talked to them,/Plus, I ain't have no phone in my apartment.” Feel free to be oblivious to anything that might hold you back. Pull out all of your household wires if necessary.

Sagittarius (Nov. 23-Dec. 22): Born this Way (Lady Gaga): It doesn’t matter if you were born this way or not—the you that you are creating out of the materials given (hardship, music, TV shows, imaginary limits) is so perfect that it is too beautiful to look at. Get yourself to a disco ball, and refract all over the place.

Capricorn (Dec. 23-Jan. 20): Awake my Soul (Mumford and Sons)  “How fickle my heart and how woozy my eyes/ I struggle to find any truth in your lies/ And now my heart stumbles on things I don't know/ This weakness I feel I must finally show/ Lend me your hand and we'll conquer them all/ But lend me your heart and I'll just let you fall/ Lend me your eyes I can change what you see/ But your soul you must keep, totally free”

Poetic License Horoscopes is a free syndicated series which appears weekly on such lit blogs as The Serotonin Factory, Critical Mass  and The Legendary If you are interested in adding Poetic License Horoscopes to your lit journal / lit blog, please email me at serotoninfactory@gmail.com.

Of Hormones and Happiness

I’m writing this from the beautiful community garden at Greene and Penn Streets, watching a goldfinch pick seeds out of sunflowers, watching for new butterflies to learn. Bees are going berserk here, it’s heartening.

Something surprising happened to me yesterday that absolutely should not have been surprising. I’ve been on this cycle for more than 20 years, but it never, never ceases to amaze me when the PMS chemicals stop fucking me up and my mood shifts like tectonic plates. Every month I’m like, why does hormone misery seem so real, so urgent? Next month, I’ll remember, I keep telling myself. The PMS sadness does sometimes help me to rearrange things that need to be rearranged, but mostly it’s just a drain followed by a relief.

My new, very not awesome moony side effect is Crying Because I Do Not Currently Have Babies. I don’t really WANT to have babies. I’m happy to lavish affection on my nieces, nephews, and everyone I know. I happen to have space issues, so the idea of sharing my body with a whole other person kind of freaks my freak. I like my pretty, grown up apartment, my quiet marriage, my time to write. Plus, I’ve seen some instances of postpartum depression that seem like they might last 18 years—that shit’s no joke.

But my body doesn’t really care about these things. Last weekend we chose Inception over The Kids are All Right for our movie date, partly because Inception seemed more big-screeny, but also because I might grind my teeth to stubs watching a happily reproduced lesbian couple for two hours.

These bouts with baby-crazy made me realize how many commercials seem like they’re really just advertisements for reproduction: Buy this video-phone and you’ll have the joy of telling your partner you’re pregnant! Buy this minivan and you’ll have two perfect kids in the backseat, watching two separate DVDs! Buy this refrigerator and your perfect husband will instantly be as baby crazy as you are!

Talk about Inception! Is it really my body wanting these things or should I just cut down on TV? (Don’t answer that! I love the TV!)