fake horoscopes: april 4th-april 10th
mercury retrograde, surrealistic realism, and the first full week in april
if i say i have no stories in me right now. if i say, let the horoscopes and poetry speak for itself. if i say, this is all i have, and i need it to be enough.
would it be?
aries (march 21st-april 19th): you will see your doppelgänger parachuting past you like the people in charge in wristcutters this week. your better half will wave happily at you before continuing to float away. you will stare at them with your jaw hanging open, dumbfounded. your childhood dog will bound up from the creek, cover you in puppy slobber and dog kisses, and then scramble back into the river to continue barking and doggy paddling downstream. the dead will be kind to you. the birds will encircle you. the squirrels will chatter righteously for you. what i’m saying is is that’s the world is your oyster. what i’m saying is it’s up to you to learn how to love the taste of brine.
✰ for aries: “prayer” by galway kinnell ✰
taurus (april 20th-may 20th): a fake auditor of the human experience will approach you with an exciting investment opportunity this week. when you ask them what exactly an auditor of the human experience does, they will either punch you in the face or lie so elaborately and spectacularly that you’ll get dizzy just listening to them. in lieu of payment or another punch in the face, ask them if it would possible to trade them a story so harrowing and kind they’ll have to sit and clutch their heart before you’re even halfway through. if they agree, tell them the story of the time a fake auditor of the human experience approached you and tried to scam you out of the equivalent of ten thousand hard earned real american dollars. dodge their next punch before they themselves are even aware it’s coming. you don’t earn bragging rights by sitting on your couch at home.
✰ for taurus — this piece which i cannot find credit for ✰
gemini (may 21st-june 20th): this week the voices inside your head will vote to have you overthrown from your current seat on city council and try to replace you with a glitch-prone hologram of jesus h. christ that looks more like donald trump. instead of trying to argue about precedent, seize your newest democratic misfortune as a god-given invitation to take the week off. go walking somewhere with enough water to go missing in. clamber up a tree or two soaking wet. commune with the sparrows over how much they hate the finches, and then cross over to the finch tree and talk shit about the sparrows. orchestrate a romeo and juliet style love affair between two of each of the neighboring birds, without all the blood and guts and misfortune. go to one of those online certification websites and get registered to be a legal wedding officiant in order to perform the ceremony for the birds. by the time you’re wiping your tears during their first dance and you remember your real life, someone will have spilled black coffee from a styrofoam cup on the motherboard for the computer that manages the hologram. they’ll always miss you if you leave. but first you have to leave.
✰ for gemini — this exchange from “eurydice” by sarah ruhl ✰
cancer (june 21st-july 22nd): a mysterious bureaucrat in an ill-fitting suit and a clipboard will approach you this week asking to interview you for the american census of poets. politely decline, and then book a one way ticket somewhere where it never snows. keep a fat wad of cash under your pillow at all times. smother yourself in cocoa butter and amber extract. a woman claiming to be the bureaucrat’s wife will meet you at a bar with $2 bottles of beer. carefully listen as she tells you all about her failed marriage to the bureaucrat. offer her the advice that you would want to hear if you were also still in love with your poorly dressed, ill fitting ex husband. wait another year or two, and a postcard from somewhere where it snows every day will turn up in your mailbox with a handwritten note saying, “thanks for saving our marriage.” are you yourself capable of sustaining romantic relationships? no. does the person you think is your soulmate ever plan on unblocking you? absolutely not. but you can let love flourish in other ways. buy yourself a book of slutty poetry and sink into a chair on the beach.
✰ for cancer — these pieces of a poem completely untraceable on google advanced search; title and author both (currently) unknown, to me at least ✰
leo (july 23rd-august 22nd): this week your shoulders long to feel the sun. too bad you’re locked in a zero-light prison of your own making. your favorite lamp will break. a book your ex gifted to you on your last birthday will fall ominously off the shelf. your nintendo d.s., the most leo gaming console every created, will shit the bed. resist the urge to throttle whatever incompetent person is next to you when the world goes to hell this week. instead of committing felony assault, take your legs for a walk. let your hair down and your shoulders out, sunscreen applied. (just kidding, leo, your hair is never actually up in the first place.) read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. read yoko ono’s cleaning pieces. cut your favorite shirt into a crop top. tie dye all your white socks rainbow. hell is a place of your own making. if you’re gonna live there, you could at least hang up some art.
✰ for leo— the first of three cleaning pieces by yoko ono ✰
virgo (august 23rd-september 22nd): this week the universe will throw you a bone. but not like a good bone. the universe will throw you a rotting, putrid bone in the middle of your piano recital. the bone will hit you on the head. it will make a cartoon network style thwunking sound when it hits your pretty little anal-retentive head. it will then bounce off your thick skull and onto the stagelit floor. but a little bloody pulp never hurt no one! at least, not enough to never step out into the world again. your job is to sign up for another recital regardless, even though your brain will tell you it’s unsafe and to stay inside and not go out from your safe zone. there is no ecstasy in bureaucracy, middlemen, maintenance requests, rush hour traffic, surge pricing, overhead lighting — all the fizzless, sexless mediocrity that capitalism hands to us under the guise of convenience and “that’s just the way things are.” but there can be a certain type of ecstasy in suffering. your own unmet desires are the most powerful force. meet yourself in clay. begin again. there is nothing to be said but please.
✰ for virgo — two of the four stanzas from “bees” by rae armantrout ✰
libra (september 23rd-ocobter 22nd): a loose pebble on your front porch. a stray cat weaving around a wood beam like liquid latticework. an entire tulip, bulb and all, wrapped in a white lace handkerchief and placed on the kitchen table. this could be your life. this is your life, if you would only let it be so. but first you need to stop stalking your ex’s new girlfriend’s instagram. block her. delete instagram entirely. you are never going to get the time back that you spent obsessing and sending your friends her posts with an “ew” added as the text. perhaps most unforgivably, you aren’t even creating interesting insults. you aren’t even being funny. hating, like everything else, is an art form, after all. you, however, are simply being pathetic. and then you have the nerve to go out into the world and pretend to still have that famous libra balance you’ve constructed your entire sense of self worth around. what if you were worthy just because, you know, you existed? what if you didn’t have to pretend to be a diplomat every time you left the house? what if you didn’t spend the rest of your one wild and precious life on our gorgeous, blue green planet looking at instagram selfies of a woman you hated? i don’t know, libra. it could be good for you. but what do i know? i’m just an omniscient being. go for a walk. stop pouting. this is the work of living. you can’t just doom scroll the real world away.
✰ for libra — this part from “catastrophe is close to godliness” by franny choi ✰
scorpio (october 23rd-november 21st): there is nothing and no one on this planet that has the time anymore to watch your spiraling, dead-end life and pretend like it isn’t self inflicted. you could be happy! you could have a good life! but instead you’ve spent your entire life since middle school self identifying with the dark. the dark is fine. the dark is great, actually. but just like libra’s constant false neutrality and diplomatic smiling is annoying, so is your constant need to have an edge on everyone else. this week a swallow and a sparrow will fight to the death in your backyard, if you don’t step in and stop the bloodbath from occurring. you are responsible for the life you lead, including the birds in need of help that come into your backyard. or you can tell yourself you’re not responsible, but deep down you know that’s not true. deep down you know that’s a terrible, shallow way to live. own up to the facts of your situation. own up to the terrible, precarious, terrifying reality of being a relatively large being in a world made primarily of smaller ones. nobody gets a medal just for being a decent human being. your reward will not be external. your reward will be the ability, after years of tossing and turning helplessly, to finally get a good night’s sleep.
✰ for scorpio — “death comes to me again, a girl” by dorianne laux ✰
sagittarius (november 22nd-december 21st): no one, not even the rain, can convince you that your life is best spent in a cubicle doing data entry under soulless corporate lighting, although the rain of course would never try to persuade you to do something so antithetical to human nature. the rain wants you to lay down in a bed of soft grass while it gently plays the piano of the wind. the rain wants you to find some good dirt and stick a seed thumb’s length down. or better yet, to find some not-good soil and make it good again: mushrooms for heavy metals, climbing beans for nitrogen, crop rotation for longevity — say, did you notice the sun came out? did you notice the choir of holy birds, all singing and longing for your equally divine attention? quick. the clouds aren’t entirely gone, there’s more just over the hill over there. come outside. we’ve probably got a good twenty minutes of direct sunlight before the grey comes back into full effect. why not grab the tiny little moments of goodness while they’re here, even though you know that they’re not gonna last? the effort to take your laptop and your morning read to the outside world is not so large. your outside shoes are right by the door already. why not make this world as livable as possible, for all things? why not grab the good dirt and not-so-good dirt and regular dirt in your hands and inhale as deeply as you can? there is no such thing as a perfect afternoon, only a person who knows the value of putting in twenty seconds of effort for twenty minutes of reward.
✰ for sag — the ending of “for m” by mikko harvey ✰
(december 22nd-january 20th): some days you feel like you’re from mars, and everyone around you is from another, infinitely less competent planet where they produce to fuck up the lives of everyone else around them who actually knows what they’re doing. this week will probably be full of those days. it’s your job, unless you want to actually go insane, to figure out how to coexist with the idiots in the world. start by sectioning off a corner of your apartment that is entirely and only for you. start by laying out a roll of butcher paper and writing down all the things you can think of to ground you even when the world is a plate of shit sliding off the dash into your lap when the car takes a hard left turn. start by finding someplace very wild, very green, and very calm. then begin going there every day. i don’t care how long it takes you to walk there from your apartment. i don’t care that it’s cold when you’re not in the sunlight. i don’t care how busy you are, because i know you’re so busy, so so busy, like actually and empirically the busiest anyone has ever been on planet earth, presumably because you have to spend so much extra time working to undo the meddling interference and fuckups of all the idiots this world (or some other world) produces. no one ever told you it was your job to spend your life micromanaging the rest of the world. because it’s not. so why act like it is? it is nobody’s fault but your own that you never learned to just sit and let your mind calm itself. that is the work that you are going to do now. you are not responsible for other people’s incompetence. you are responsible for yourself. learn to breathe. it’s the first step in becoming a well-adjusted, grounded, helpful member of society.
✰ for capricorn — this exchange from “the war of vaslav nijinsky” by frank bidart ✰
aquarius (january 21st-february 18th): when are you going to learn that a series of small little bumps is a million times more effective than railing an entire line to the face? this week, the curtains over the bay window demand a little extra appreciation. so does the bay window itself. the bunnies living in the burrow right at the hedge line between your and your neighbor’s yard have put in an application as well. actually, so has the entire kingdom of god’s creation. i guess it’s a good thing that you’ve never actually had a serious, “gainfully-employed” type job, huh? how else would you have enough space in your schedule to stumble around open-mouthed in wonder at all the beauty and jazz of the universe’s creation? tack on your favorite raincoat and your most waterproofed wellies. the world is only as alive as you are willing to give it credit for. this week you have all the time in the world to appreciate the subtle miracle of the world’s small beauties. and thank god. who else is gonna model for capricorn how to actually experience the outside of their head in a mindful, somewhat sane way?
✰ for aquarius — the first stanza from “at north farm” by john ashberry ✰
pisces (february 19th-march 20th): a ghost carriage carrying a ghost baby will roll by your front door this week. you are not the impenetrable protagonist of a b-grade horror movie, however, so don’t go chasing it. you think you are, but you’re not. if anything you’re the protagonist’s restlessly overeager dog, desperate to please, your pupils dilating to the size of a pinprick when you see something that you have to run after. and boy, do you run. you run and you run and you run and never once do you question if all of that running is necessary. give your legs and overactive imagination a break. it is poor attention, not the childlike wonder or curiosity you misshapenly cosplay, that sends you running out the door. no matter how much you tell yourself that you love the chase, the truth is nobody really loves their compulsions. there is no freedom if freedom is mandated. there is no dignity, no matter how much you pretend, in lunging without a choice. your life is a much more serious thing than you give it credit for. it’s time to start thinking like someone who is aware of this fact.
✰ and for pisces — the entirety of “how to be a dog” by andrew kane ✰
xx, and also oo,
jojo
the manic pixie dream girl’s guide to existential angst is a sometimes free newsletter (and the occasional poem) from joelle schumacher. if you enjoy their work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, and/or subscribe to or write in to their advice column (but preferably and, instead of or).
and if you’re in the denver area, come to a writing workshop.
photography page ✰ commissions/work with me ✰ instagram ✰ twitter