Poetic License Horoscope for June 8-14

Gemini: This week, in ways large and small, be like Mayor Muriel Bowser. With Washington D.C. under military occupation, she still found a way to make Black Lives Matter Plaza happen right in front of the White House. Your installations may not be as big or as resourced, but you can be a monument to justice, peace, beauty, and strength every day. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Cancer: It’s not that we birdwatchers (What? Stars can be birdwatchers!) hate leashless dogs! It’s message that their owners are sending: “Your bodily autonomy, your freedom, your safety, the birds’ homes, none of these things matter much as this animal I live vicariously through, this hapless, jumping thing that poops outside because I can’t.” Cancer, you’re the opposite of these folks: careful, deliberate, kind in the right direction, as you face the open wild or just the neighborhood woods.

Leo: The stars support your quest to curate your feeds, to weed out the racists or those who hate science or those who would stand on capitol steps with guns to fight for the right to murder us all with their breath. You know what’s on the other side of the silo, why wouldn’t you? Start thinking of estrangement as social divestment—some people just don’t deserve you.

Virgo: “How often have we heard you say that everything is futile, that nothing comes of all your labors?  Yet like amorphous buds, you endeavors sprout in all directions. You see everything as formless and you forget that this is a sign of life.” Hilma Af Klint. You’ve planted 1,500 morning glory seeds, but feel free to plant more. It’s all coming up, we promise.

Libra: The pieces of the portrait you’ve been working on so LONG are falling into place. Soon, you’ll see those kind eyes again, that shining, lucid heart. Spread out your love on the table like one hundred glitter gel pens and exclaim, exclaim, EXCLAIM about the sparkles. I can’t wait to see the whole of the angel’s magic face.

Scorpio: There’s a riot in your belly and that’s perfectly okay. According to alchemists, “vitriol” is an acronym for “Visita Inerriora Terrae Rectifcando Invenies Occultum Lapidum.” That means “By visiting the center of earth, you will find the Philosopher’s Stone.” Get a stick and poke around at the fires inside you, see what shapes appear in the flames.

Sagittarius: My neighbor buys flowers for herself every Sunday. She says that when she did this at the beginning of quarantine, back when we were all just hoarding Purell, the people in line at the co-op got annoyed with her, but it’s not their business what she finds necessary to her survival. No matter what letters there are to write, how many marches on your protest dance card, what weeping is forced upon you, set an alarm to got get yourself something beautiful. The stars are so glad you exist.

  Capricorn: The stars are sorry to both you and Rory Gilmore that we can’t do a thing about the whole humidity thing. Instead, we suggest watching the movie Adult World, set in our hometown of Syracuse, NY. That way, you can cool off watching a whole bunch of snow in our old neighborhood! Plus, you’ll get to see John Cusack go to Recess Coffee! That’s something, right?

Aquarius: Good work will come soon enough, we promise. For now, take to your bed like John and Yoko. Hold meetings, Be-Ins, singalongs, or cuddle parties, or all these at once. Invite the comforter to facilitate. Ask every pillow her opinion, and if it’s okay that you hug her. Count your audience of sleep masks, scandalous night-books, fancy lotions. Be very, VERY thorough.

Pisces: Thank the planets that are leaving your orbit, or just decisively swipe left. You don’t need a reason, just blow them away like dandelion fluff. You can build altars to them out of candles and spangles. Glitter bomb the places in your body and heart where long- or new-lost friends reside. It’s okay if you’re feeling scared and alone. The stars are with you, no matter what.

Aries: This week in the stars’ neighborhood, a group of six young people planned a protest in 48 hours. They hoped about fifty people would come, but it turned out to be over a thousand. Every step and turn of our “Whose streets? Our streets!” route was decorated with sacred names and cases of water. This was a miracle and also a privilege: Downtown, my friends were still facing violent police and the National Guard. Build everything you can, Aries, and don’t take a bit of it for granted.

Taurus: The stars are profoundly sorry that we forgot you the other week! Here’s what’s in your Apology Basket: Milk to wash away teargas. Spangles for all of your placards. Friends with ears that listen. One flower for every emotion in your heart, at any given minute. Scattered and prolific petals. Bearable heat. Every smell of candle you love. A reminder to drink enough water. The promise that we still know you’re a prism.

Poetic License Horoscopes (May 25-31)

Gemini: You know who’s excited about quarantine!? Well, excited is probably the wrong word but BOREDOM RESEARCHERS! https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-natural-experiment/ Join their experiments. See what’s going on with your old friend Boredom. Doodle around the edges of it. Build a shrine of pushpins and binder clips. Burn looseleaf as sage. Sit until you turn into cloudscapes, until your breath and your voice stop feeling like weapons. It’s a peace you deserve.

Cancer: Last Thursday night while Shamanic Journeying via Zoom, (Like one does.) the stars were dragged Blair Witch style into a dark wood shining only with fluorescent blue leaves. Plants are sometimes the only kind of touching, aren’t they? The only hint of life? The big leaves were both warm and cool to the touch, shifting colors because they were a dream. Curl up in those dark dream leaves until some helping creature arrives to lead you to a bright meadow.

Leo:   As the person who built an Aurora Borealis/ the door from Russian Doll out of tissue paper and LED lights, you can accomplish most things. Step one: Learn all the names of the flowers before you graduate to fungus, grasses, butterflies, and birds. String up the prettiest names like lights, make your gardens like lights, make the petals like lights too, why not? Delphinium, pulmonaria, kalanchoe, whatever names feel best, say them like prayers.

Virgo: “The sky over the city has too much light, baby. You can see the stars a little but you gotta work for them.” N.K. Jemesin, The City We Became. What pulses in the city of you, now without the thrum and crush of your commute? Now that you’re not being honked at so often when you hesitate for a nanosecond at green lights. Now that you’re commercial-free, where are the new gaps? See if you can hear it, or better yet, hold out your hands to the sky and wait to be touched.

Libra: A long walk in the woods, if you can. Not on the weekend, that would be nuts. It’s okay if the walk’s in your mind, or on watercolor paper. If you can’t ride your bike along the rivers and creeks or dance in a crowd under a big bridge any time soon, what then? Can you listen to those gentle studying songs until you sleep new lessons? Can you, very carefully, twist ropes into wings? The stars are sending new ways for you to sit in the sun and every puzzle you can hold in your two warm hands for hope.

Scorpio: Like everyone (Well, not everyone.) you are a business rebuilding, a Festival Girl whose travels have paused. Be even more than usual the stars’ favorite palindrome: drawn inward. Your imagination will grow forests and populate seas. Make your Tolkein-maps of undiscovered realms. Your mantra for now is here be dragons. It’s okay if you don’t yet see the treasure underneath.

Sagittarius: You’re a library. And the head librarian of that library. Ask the Front Desk (also you) where the Mystical Experience section is. Turn left at the card catalog of Conversations Your Barbies had, head past the Disco Songs Your Mom Used to Sing. The Special Collection is showing the archives from the Museum of Bad Advice, but don’t sign in there just yet—you just washed your hands. Check out as many items as you’d like, the City of You has changed its overdue policy.

Capricorn: If there’s one thing that (dear but un-re-watchable) Friends got right about the Nineties, its how much every day turned on the axis of coffee. Tired from doing not-very-much until sunrise or from a young, walloping misunderstanding of the proportions of a gin and tonic, we would migrate to our (way more rewatchable!) friends in basements, on porches, in just-barely-bookstores. We can’t do most of that right now, but: A porch, a cup of good coffee, a Sunday you feel ambivalent about, a dear friend, and peace.

Aquarius: As much as the stars are OBSESSED with Marie Kondo, there really is no one right way to clean a basement. If you want to go scorched-earth and pitch it all out, go ahead, the stars won’t tell anyone. If you want to lovingly turn over every document, write a sonnet to every shred of ephemera, every errant leaflet, go ahead, why not? It’s your basement, and even if it isn’t, too bad, you’re the one doing the work. Go down the steps and start.

Pisces: Every classroom you’ve even been in, teaching or learning, home or away, LOVES you. Each one keeps like love letters the maps you’ve drawn of them, the spreadsheets, the procedures, the hand-written signs. Buildings know how to love all-encompassingly and so do teachers, so do students. The windows are open to the summer breeze. The sun is giddily shattering concentration and helping the houseplants to feed themselves. The pencils are all sharpened, the dry-erase markers are fresh and multicolored. These things remember, and so do you.

Aries: Get caught in the rain without worrying that your phone will catch a raindrop. There will be no need to sleep overnight in rice. You have a blowdryer and towels if you need them. Loosen your mask before it starts to feel like drowning. If, once you’re inside again reading with your coffee, the sun comes out, you don’t even have to get up and look outside for the rainbow. The rainbow will come to you.

Poetic License Horoscopes, May 17-24

(Made-Up and Always Taking Requests)

Taurus: Write a letter to your younger self, the longer-ago, the better, asking for their advice. Then disregard about 80% of that advice, because really, what do they know? The other 20%, follow it to the letter. Better yet, strew that advice like rose petals around every doorway you enter. Walk around presiding like a benevolent, naïve god.

Gemini: It’s lilac time in Upstate New York! At the Rochester Lilac Festival, (So, not this year…) you can buy a bottle of Highland Lilac perfume to save for the dead of winter. That’s what they don’t tell you, those who would have you wring your hands about the passage of time! (Like me.) Just in case, take care to delicately strain the sweet-smelling essence from today—someday you’ll need it!

Cancer: Last summer, my driving-home-from-the-beach-music was the jazzy little tune that Lawfair played to indicate direct quotes from The Mueller Report. Its gentle brush-taps were as soothing as salty hair and as skin full of solar energy. They were as kind as having a friend to drive you home from Aunt Patti’s when you’re tired from swimming. The truth is like that! Go ahead and cozy in.

Leo: Like Midsommar, but nice. Heap up a pyramid of flowers around you, no matter where the heck they’re being grown. So many colors! So many kinds! Sew sunflowers onto lovely places, like apron pockets and star maps. It’s bright out, but it won’t disrupt your rhythms. There’s absolutely nothing untoward in the lemonade or the individual pot pies. The dancing is real, though, and so are the bears; both are friendly, full, and ready for hugs.

Virgo: “Grief is praise because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”—Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise. (by way of my yoga teacher) Spill out your jar or grief-gems and warm them in your hands. Charm them and hold them up to the light. Someday, you’ll be able to stock up again on Hope Diamond postcards, but for now, see what else sparkles.

Libra: You are a collage of wedding cards, cut precisely into colors, shapes, and patterns, a horizon of bright flowers, a gleefully interrupted sky. You are the infinite gift of watercolors, spilling swirls of aliveness onto everything. You are a protective circle when the dance floor gets threatening—wordless, loyal, absolute. You are a 3 AM kiss that butterflies into friendship, fluttering to the stars.

Scorpio: You know that feeling when you’re a lady who hasn’t seen your gay high-school boyfriend for like thirty years (Except for at that one family funeral.) and then you meet up at The Brooklyn Museum to catch up and see Frida Kahlo’s dresses? And then you find yourself standing in front of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party contemplating the elaborate and beautiful vagina-themed place-settings? And like good Catholic kids, you notice the names of the saints written in gold script on the tile floor? No? Just me? Well, look for something just as magical and weird, and greet it with aplomb.

Sagittarius: Marie Kondo says that if something doesn’t spark joy but you can’t bring yourself to part with it, keep it with confidence. I’ll go one more and say love it with confidence. The churning papers, the infinitely doubling photo roll, the sticky note whereupon a cute person returning your Bon Iver CD said you were amazing. Even keep the pictures you only took so you’d remember where you parked, if you want to. Don’t partition it off into neat little boxes! Sit at the top of your hoard like a dragon.

Capricorn: I’m here for you. I’ll document every blossom and change of light in your old neighborhood, and make sure you see. I’ll check the board games to make sure they have all the pieces for the next time you come over. While you nap, I’ll collect the light from your windows and store it in jars for then you wake up. I’ll pour you the drink of your choice, crack a Hi-Biscus La Croix and we can sit in the yard. The flowers may be fluttering away to other things, but there’s something else coming if we wait quietly: leaves! They surprise me every time.

Aquarius: “i like serendipity, I guess.”—Sarah Rose Etter. Sarah was talking about auspicious peach roses, but you can make any wish. Well, not any—these sort of things don’t work for million-dollarses or universal healthcare, just modest, fanciful, idiosyncratic wishes. But yes, open your eyes and gather, check off synchronicities like bird-sightings. Bring home your pareidolia bouquet and place it at the center of everything, because it is.

Pisces: Tidy out this week all of your bad muses, the ones you think you have to ask for permission, the ones that ask you (You THINK they ask you, you haven’t actually spoken in years.) to move slower or smaller or not at all. Throw them like bad books against the wall, cancel them like Firefly (Except they’ll deserve it.) blow them into the wind like they’re dandelions, but not as effective.

Aries: The first quarantine book my dad asked for was Walden, so remember how bad Thoreau was at being alone. It’s easy to be monkish when your mom is making you muffins, but your job is to find your muffin-equivalents, any taste of closeness and care. Take a shamanic journey via Zoom or start long Instagram conversations with other people’s pets. Remember how you got close before you could go anywhere. Remember how you first fed yourself. Remember alone, but don’t forget to call.