A Playlist for The High Priestess

BY JOANNA C. VALENTE

Because I love playlists and Tarot, I decided to merge the two. For each Major Arcana card, I’m making a playlist. Here is the one for The High Priestess. In a similar vein, I had made playlists for each zodiac sign, which you can check out here. All Tarot playlists can be found here.

From Lucidvox to The Cure, this playlist aspires to let you dig into your intuition and spiritual self. Link here and below.

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Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Sexting Ghosts, Xenos, No(body), #Survivor: A Photo Series (forthcoming), and A Love Story (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault and the illustrator of Dead Tongue (Yes Poetry, 2020). They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and Joanna is the founder of Yes Poetry and the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine.

A holy little thing: writing and ancestral magic

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Editor’s Note: This was first published in Ritual Poetica

LISA MARIE BASILE

My grandmother — or nonna — was born Concetta Maria Lipari. She went by the name Mary, at least in the United States. She emigrated with her sisters, by sea, from Palermo, Sicily.

“I saw Mussolini’s men under the lemon trees,” she told me once when I was in my mid-twenties. It would be one of the last times I saw her, her wrinkled hands held in my father’s palms. I was too young, too distracted, and too naive, to ask her for more memories.

The idea of her living under that regime becomes more real to me as I grow older, wiser, and more interested in how identities and places change due to oppression and ideology. How Sicily was ruled and conquered more than anywhere else, how all that change, fear, culture, and belief exists in my blood today. How it shows up in America, too. The salt and all the tides of time. And how we reckon with it.

I also think of the lemons. Those beautiful bright gifts from heaven; how, years after her death, I’d step foot onto Italian soil to taste their sweetness, to wander limoncello-drunk down Duomo steps and through piazzas and little streets. I started in the North on Lago Maggiore and made my way down through Naples to the Amalfi Coast. I still haven’t tasted Palermo, drank of my own blood.

There is magic in nature. In salt and lemon and water. And I think my grandmother knew this, although she wouldn’t refer to it as such. She was a devout Catholic — she’d go to church every day, maybe twice per day. She and my grandfather attended the Saint Gianna Beretta Molla Parish down in South Jersey, and when I attended both of their funerals, with the same funereal rites — the songs and smoke and procession — I felt that same intoxication I did as a child. I was again reminded of the power of ritual. The institution and its rites are overwhelming, luminous, frightening, and not a bit complicated. That tendency toward ritual, toward the magic and mysticism of action and intent, is etched into me. The primordial Paganism that was rewritten with fear and shadow — and yet I found some comfort in it.

I recall my grandmother doing a few things that bewildered me as a younger person. First, she pulled out a box of her own long, thick black hair — darker than my own — and waved it over our cake as we sat eating. My aunt promptly said, “Mom — we can put that away?!” But it was something about preserving her youth, reclaiming her power, keeping memories, staying safe. It was, I suppose, a spell of sorts. She lived well into her 90s.

LISA MARIE BASILE

My other memories are of altars and shrines — over the television, on shelves, in corners covered in embroidered cloth, candles, sacred images, tiny statuettes (one of which I took for myself, or was given; I can’t remember), crucifixion triptychs, figurines, vials, relics, holy water collected in old Cola bottles, taped with pictures of Jesus or the saints. I can almost evoke the scent of their home. Perfume, something dry and old, incense, the smell of the air in South Jersey—a specific mix of something and trees. It has all become mythology to me.

And upon the altars were scrolls — dozens of tiny scrolls, etched with prayers and blessings, wishes, and words in both Sicilian and in English. She’d slip the scrolls in between statues of saints and figurines, roll them up under hanging rosaries. Once, when I knew it was the end, I stole two of the papers. I felt she would forgive me. I wanted something of hers, something handwritten. Something beautiful. As a writer, it felt only right. Or perhaps that’s me romanticizing everything.

My grandmother wasn’t a warm woman. She had seven children and dozens of grandchildren — and she brutally picked favorites. The fear of God led her to judgment and cruelty in many ways, and we were not close for many reasons. As a child, she didn’t hold me in her lap or stroke my hair or care for me. She visited, we made dishes and dishes of food, she told me I was too skinny, and she sent me scapulars and bottles of holy water. She also warned me about the Devil and told me ghost stories. They were violent and strange and they haunt me today — the man who killed himself in her basement. The child swinging on a chandelier. The old woman dressed in black who came in and out of the house.

These stories were always told or spoken about at family dinners. The consensus was that Grandma Mary had ‘lost her marbles,’ or always been a bit off, that perhaps having seven children had worn her down. Perhaps it was emigration and a loss of her culture, assimilation, her marriage, the wars, or mental health issues. I think it is a mix.

LISA MARIE BASILE

But I am not so sure it wasn’t something else, too. Something divine or ghastly. I don’t know what I think of the afterlife, but I know my grandmother was tuned in to something. Some otherness. Some else-ness. She seemed to have existed in a magical realist realm. It seemed only loosely tethered to here and now. Of course, only in retrospect can you see these truths for what they are.

My mother, who isn’t Sicilian, always says, “You’re just like your grandmother Mary.” I can’t tell if it’s a good thing, but it’s a potent thing. I do have her pale olive skin, her dark hair. We are both water signs.

In this way, intuiting the power of the word was passed down to me. I now use scrolls on my own altars. I have been doing it before I knew I was doing it — before I thought of myself as a word witch or an alchemist of letters or a poet, and before I believed in anything at all.

I have always kept journals and wrote letters and I would throw wishes into rivers at a child. The writing felt Important to me. Performing poems aloud felt like I was achieving something, casting something out. Exorcising, incanting, making, even if I didn’t have the words for it nor the conscious cognisance of intention and belief.

I think of my grandmother’s use of scrolls as a Benedicaria, a (purposefully?) vague and recent term for Southern Italian or Sicilian traditions of blessings. Benedicaria is at its core Catholic, yet it operates without explicit language, without much ado. In Campania, where I traveled alone last year, it’s translated into do a little holy thing (Fa Lu Santuccio).

In my limited understanding, it is an innate, religious understanding of things you just do — in your house or with your family or in your kitchen. It’s intuited, not fancy, and detached from glossaries and definitions. It’s not stregheria, either. It’s something different.

It’s sacramentals and olive oil and warding off the evil eye. Saving hair and writing scrolls. It isn’t magical, and she wouldn’t want to see it that way. It’s just what you do.

Ironically, given this entire post and its emphasis on the Word, what my grandmother was doing — and what I do — doesn’t have a specific name. I may call it magic or witchcraft, and she may have called it prayer (especially writing in her mother tongue, which was, in many ways, taken from her). But it’s just what feels natural.

Writing is part of who I am. It is my sacredness and my profanity. My prayer and my craft. My impact, my wound, and my reclamation. A product of a divinity or a call to it. An ancestral power that I’ve tapped into, but one that feels, somewhat, on loan to me. I am a recipient of a message. I am a vessel. Maybe it comes from a God, or a saint. Maybe it comes from history’s echoes, some sort of ancestral hum. Maybe it’s a gene. Maybe it is a gift. Or maybe not at all.

I will fill my own life, and this world, with a sea of letters, stained by lemon and sunlight, and hope that it washes something beautiful to shore. It’s just a holy little thing, writing. It creates something from nothing. It’s my meaning. It is my thank you to existence.

Lisa Marie Basile is the founding creative director of Luna Luna Magazine, & the author of a few books of poetry and nonfiction, including Light Magic for Dark Times and The Magical Writing Grimoire. She's written for or been featured in The New York Times, Entropy, Grimoire Magazine, Sabat Magazine, Giallo Lit, Catapult, The Atlas Review, Best American Experimental Writing, and more. 

Electroluminescence, a poem

BY RENA MEDOW

Electroluminescence

Last night I felt like watching a thriller

taking in someone else’s damages for once.

I collect all your pale thank you’s

more transparent than a moon.

I prefer to think of others’ lives

lived in a series of miniature rooms

in a grand solar in some far away museum.

I am growing so tired of mine. I fall asleep alone and wake up alone,

but always another rustles around in the middle hours.

Their phone light not a lighthouse, no electroluminescent beacon home—

The trees without leaves service only northbound crows.

This is how it always ends, a love stripped bare and planted in

cold soil.

My mouth sings a song of itself, for itself, dying at its own pace.

I pull corpses from their roots and toss them to the curb.

Across the road, donkeys graze the pasture. In the road,

two yellow lines parallel extend towards nowhere, which

is near here, I hear. The tree I’m beneath is the descendant of trees.

That donkey there, the descendant of donkeys.

I forage for kindling with bugs in my hair,

a gymnasium of wet curls. It takes two matches to light the fire, six

in the rain. An illusion of self-sufficiency. Here, I only save

caterpillars from barn cats, not love from

thrown objects and raised voices.

No, even when I enter the orchard

to pick windfalls off the ground, and strain my worn

body, there are four bushels at the end.

Three to give back, one to take home. If only the heart could get a quarter

of what it gives, to munch on later. Worm and all.

The trumpet of day flat-tones against the trees,

and I savor this bland life, forever a matter of too much or too little.


Rena Medow attended the New School for poetry, Emily Carr University for painting and the Langara Certificate program for Journalism. Her first poetry chapbook, "I Have been Packing This Suitcase All My Life So Why Is It Empty?" came out in the fall of 2017 from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Her poems, essays, articles and illustrations have been featured in a variety of places, including The Vancouver Sun, Langara Voice, VICE, LunaLuna Magazine and The Minetta Review.

Sylvia Plath: Madre from Beyond

BY ADRIAN ERNESTO CEPEDA

“I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty.”

― Sylvia Plath

I know many are going to ask how did I get here? Emotionally, physically sick with mental health issues. Some may ask how can you have depression when you have published three acclaimed poetry collections? My life changed on November 11, 2017. Mi Mami died, four months before my first poetry collection Flashes and Verses…Becoming Attractions was published in March 2018 by Unsolicited Press. My mother was my number one supporter of mi poesia, and my drive to be published. When no one else did, she believed and saw the potential of my life’s calling, mi Mami was the one who gave me the gift of la poesía. She has always been my number one champion. When I was working as a retail servant, at every bookstore and record shop, you could imagine, she believed that I was more than a bookseller and I had poetry that needed to expressed, written and shared with the world. I would send her poemas for her cumpleaños and navidad. She called them gifts from my Corazon. Mami was more than my motivational compass, it was her belief in my calling to become a published poeta that focused every volume of my creative light. `

After she passed away, I realize now that I was in denial, for three years. Her death overshadowed all my publication successes. Since 2017, I spent this time promoting my three poetry books, especially my latest La Belle Ajar, a collection of cento poems inspired by Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel and focusing on my career as a published poet. Instead of facing all the complex emotions of mourning the death of mi Mami, I compartmentalized these feelings, I was not ready to face, and worked on trying to make a name for myself in the publishing world. Foolishly I actually believed that publishing these books would somehow lessen the pain and make me happy. The opposite happened. With every book, positive review and acclaim from my community of poets and writers, something was missing. There was this huge gap of grief in my life that I was trying to fill with my success as a published poet.

So, I went looking for mother figures to try to replace the hole that was left after mi Mami died. But that just caused even more pain and confusion. While I was trying to help mi familia settle mi Mami’s estate, I became sick from not facing any of the issues of my mother’s death. This is when I rediscovered Sylvia Plath. For over a year she became my surrogate Mother. I turned to her words, her poems, her stories, her diaries, her quotes for guidance and for a while, her supernatural support helped me. Then one day, whilst I was reading one of the many biographies, from the plethora of books I bought to learn from mi Madre from beyond, towards the end of this bio I came to the part where Plath dies. And even though in my conscious mind I knew that Plath had taken her life on February 11, 1963, the part of me that was needing a mother figure was devastated. It felt like I had lost another madre and this was the beginning of where my story starts to turn towards my health crisis.

I should’ve known when I was reading Sylvia’s poem, “The Morning Song” when she wrote:

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

It was obvious. It felt like Plath was speaking to me, especially at the end of the poem:

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Towards the end of the summer of the pandemic, the balloon that held the grief for the death of mi Mami popped. Just like Sylvia Plath once wrote: “See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.” Since 2017, I had avoided facing any of the sorrow of her passing and it manifested in ailments, illnesses and sickness that would take over my body. Horrible acid reflux, hay fever, whopping cough, recurring influenzas, crippling back, leg and muscle spasms along with outbreaks of shingles was my body telling me I was hurting emotionally from the inside. It was the loss of mi Mami that I did not want to face. All of this pain was manifesting in all of these symptoms. I was missing her and was afraid to admit it. For years I would call mi Mami on the telephone and if I were stressed out, worried or sick, her words, advice or just hearing my mother’s voice would make me feel better. Since she died, I had no one to connect with, I missed mi Mami and I was desperately trying to find someone or some mother figure to take her place. This is why I turned to Sylvia Plath. But after I finished my book La Belle Ajar, I realize now I was missing mi Mami more. My condition worsened during the shutdown. I was suffering from daily debilitating anxiety attacks and I know I was not the only one. Plath said it best when she wrote in her journal: “I have much to live for, yet unaccountably I am sick and sad.” I talked to and know of so many poets and writers who were dealing with recurring traumas, depression and grief during the pandemic and I was no different. It wasn’t just the emotions of her grief, there were so many reasons for my sicknesses. Sylvia Plath perfectly described my physical symptoms that I was battling on a daily basis when she described:

The sickness rolled through me in great waves. After each wave it would fade away and leave me limp as a wet leaf and shivering all over and then I would feel it rising up in me again, and the glittering white torture chamber tiles under my feet and over my head and all four sides closed in and squeezed me to pieces.

More than rock bottom, physically and emotionally every day worsened, I felt like I was in pieces. My panic attacks worsened my daily medications that I was taking for my health issues stopped working, my anxiety went out of control, I couldn’t swallow food nor eat. And worse, I had insomnia, the worst of my life. I was emotionally and physically sick. But I was in denial believing that my suffering was physical and not mental like Plath once wrote:

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn’t say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

I felt the same way as Plath. It had to be a physical ailment that could be cured by a visit to my primary care physician but as the days rolled on, my condition became critical. Towards the third week of another month fighting this illness when, literally on my hands and knees weeping, I realized that I needed to ask for help for my mental illness.

It’s not an accident that I chose Plath as my surrogate madre. She was a reflection of the issues that I had kept simmering inside for years. When I finally found help, the right medication, and started talking to a therapist, the darkness was slowly starting to subside. The insomnia felt like a curse that was haunting me. The lack of sleep was affecting my creativity, my appetite and I felt lost alone in my exhausted and paranoid thoughts. It wasn’t till I rediscovered my creative light again when I reconnected with mi Mami, writing her letters, that it all started to make sense to me. The therapy, the medication and my daily correspondence with my Mami is what brought me back from the dark and insomnia that had been haunting me during the pandemic. Plath explained it best when she wrote: “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.” That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” I was afraid to face any of the emotions of mi Mami’s death. Looking back if I had written these letters during the period when I was struggling with promoting my poetry books, I may have faced some of these issues in a healthier way instead of burying them inside my subconscious.

Alas like my Lazarus lady from beyond, I felt my own rebirth as Plath wrote:

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.   
There is a charge

This is how it is slowly starting to feel like. Like I am being recharged and resurrected into a new way of seeing life. And although I realize that Sylvia’s charge was electroshock therapy, my charge was more symbolic, of realizing my own inner chemical imbalance was affecting the rest of my living body.

It was no accident that I connected with Plath mi Madre from beyond. Lady Lazarus became a mirror of the pain that I was beginning to feel that I finally unleashed after three years of not being ready to experience the pain of mi Mami’s death.

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

There were scars, dark bags under my eyes and I didn’t want to look in the mirror. My heart would beat so fast because of my anxiety and it would go and thunder on causing my insomnia to keep me awake.

Finally, there was a charge. My charge was my medication, the right one that reconnected me to mi Mami and this led to a resurgence in my craft, my writing, my calling that I was put here to share my life through my canvas on the page.

And there is a charge, a very large charge   
For a word or a touch […]

I am your opus,
I am your valuable, 

 I wish I could thank Sylvia. Although she had a very complicated relationship with the legacy of her dead father which she explored in some of her most famous poems like “Daddy,” sadly, Plath never found any closure over the death of her father and I did not want to follow in the painful legacy that she poured into her poetry. Although, we both eventually had different paths to our dead parents, I want to thank her surrogate guidance eventually led me back to mi Mami. Because of this, I would say muchas gracias for her words, poems and guidance helped me reunite with la memoria of my own Mami. For making me see that I am valuable and for helping me to reconnect with mi Mami three years after her death. My opus is the collection of poems, Speaking con su Sombra, that were written for and inspired by Mami. For years, I couldn’t face looking at this manuscript because I was afraid of dealing with the issues of grief and pain from mi Mami’s death. But Sylvia, was the surrogate Madre from beyond that I needed at the time. Plath led me to where I needed to be. Like Sylvia, I crawled back home, “beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make [poems and prose] beauty out of sorrow,” it will be worth this long full circle journey to reconnect with my own blood and flesh, from the other side. This inner voyage with Sylvia Plath brought me home with Mi Mami. Sylvia guided me by showing me how to treasure the imperfect inspiration masterpiece that is my writing vida like the lines I wrote in the seventh poem of La Belle Ajar:

I lay in bed
My ache
would rouse me, peaceful
fingers, cheerful I came
fumbling the blur of tenderness
breathing exhausted, I stared….

My goal is to go further than the explorations I created with Plath on La Belle Ajar write on. Because I am reconnecting with mi Mami, it feels like she will be by my side as I go through the final stages of revising and editing the collection of poems, Speaking con su Sombra, that she inspired. Thanks to mi Mami’s guidance, I am rediscovering emotions in poems that I will explore on the canvas in each volume of my living breathing page.

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda is the author of the full-length poetry collection Flashes & Verses… Becoming Attractions from Unsolicited Press, and the poetry chapbook So Many Flowers, So Little Time from Red Mare Press. Between the Spine is a collection of erotic love poems published with Picture Show Press and La Belle Ajar, a collection of cento poems inspired by Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel, to be published in 2020 by CLASH Books.

His poetry has been featured in Cultural Weekly, Frontier Poetry, Yes, Poetry, 24Hr Neon Magazine, Red Wolf Editions, poeticdiversity, The Wild Word, The Fem, Pussy Magic Press, Tiferet Journal, Rigorous, Palette Poetry, Rogue Agent Journal, Tin Lunchbox Review, Rhythm & Bones Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Neon Mariposa Magazine, The Yellow Chair Review and Lunch Ticket’s Special Issue: Celebrating 20 Years of Antioch University Los Angeles MFA in Creative Writing.

Adrian is an LA Poet who has a BA from the University of Texas at San Antonio and he is also a graduate of the MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles where he lives with his wife and their cat Woody Gold

Poetry by Noeme Grace C. Tabor-Farjani

BY NOEME GRACE C. TABOR-FARJANI

The mountain beckons

The mountain beckons so does this task at hand, the work waiting and waiting. The mountain is not far to behold but it calls, so leave my slippers and staff, and stare at the fire that turns air into tablets. I pray, please turn my breathing into ink.

I only feel the malty mint, the days gone by are back. The barefoot hours, stage the dance of trees in front of me. And I think: they are still there, the earth’s still here.

There are no memories of wind, but there is one that blows desire, wrapped in fresh silence. Almost a fulfillment of longing of some unknown home, or romance, or power. Vague as the clouds, gray and shapeless, moving into uncertain spaces, telling no stories but whispers the quiet moments.

I no more count the hours for nameless acts. It’s just air blowing cold. It’s just rain that looks like it will fall. It’s just what they call a gloomy day, perfect for a song and maybe more of the wonder of the eternal now.

In stillness, solitude, and surrender, all of earth will sing with my desire.

The road hides from a busy highway

The road hides from a busy highway. Those who look not for magic is lost. Trees lined, bowing to majestic dusty pathway. Those who look not for magic won’t see the silver and gold in the cobblestones. The disappearing grass, playing hide and seek with the skies.

This season, we made fires from branches who ask to make love with earth. Those who seek not magic won’t hear the stories of the clouds. Surrounded by the sea, the sky, the mountains. I sit by the wall and sing my songs until Faith cascades down to the stillness of sand, letting go of waves.

Those who seek no magic won’t ever be still, won’t dance...

See the sun, the sky, the sand, the sea, the breeze, the trees. Only they know our spells, the secret of our days. The roof is a bed the stars shelter many dreams.

Those who look not for magic is lost.

The requiem

I.

Steady the hand as not to drip the soup from that spoon: it has battled long enough in the wild, held a sword, a stone, an arrow, a knife. Now it is time to be a wife.

Soothe the trembling that wants to travel through your skin. To kill is not a sin.

Steady the hands that are unsure. If it wants more of a fill: here’s some meat, roasted well some seconds for some sweets? Does he really want to eat?

Steady the tremors from your hands as they run to your heart. The images of battles on your tables: Kitchen where spices scatter, the meals eaten by whiners, the cluttered desk, the empty screen. Maybe you let an enemy in?

Steady the thoughts and capture them. You do not divide to rule and win. You serve, you love, you write. You feed those with trembling hands. You clean the cluttered tables. You fold the fitted sheets. You fill the blank white sheets.

I tell him, let’s kill this. To kill is not a sin.

II.

When their visit wake you up

at 4, you barely have enough sleep.

They gear you up for a battle

that is not yours

and you try not to engage.

There you are with an armor

that drags you down,

a shield you can barely lift.

And the questions come

like a colony of red ants,

a swarm of wasps in your heart.

What do they call them?

●

The food is ready,

My feet are up on the porch bench

We are waiting for Iftar.

The past 29 nights

are dizzying movements

in the kitchen.

But my body is not tired.

The summer rains

are a miracle tied to the curse

of the season.

I watch the birds play

under the drizzle,

filtered by dusk.

I thought birds hide

for cover when it rains.

Twilight nears.

The earth seem content

with the caress of showers.

I bath myself in the breath

of the sky and trees.

A long time has passed,

Have I been missed

By these creatures of mist.

The Earth quietly blankets

herself, settling

in the bed of night.

The way I embrace a faith

foreign from mine.

Iftar is here.

Noeme Grace C. Tabor-Farjani has authored Letters from Libya, a chapbook of short memoirs about her family's escape from the Second Libyan Civil War in 2014. Her works have recently appeared in Your Dream Journal and Global Poemic and forthcoming in Fahmidan Journal and Rogue Agent. In 2018, she successfully defended her PhD dissertation in creative writing pedagogy. In between gardening and yoga, she teaches literature and humanities at the high school level in the Philippines. She is currently working on a chapbook of poems on spirituality and the body. 

Poetry & Photography by Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins

demons

—Summer,   is in the high winds—
grapes and graves   pendulate
hopeless \  drained
swooping men into their elixir, 
women / bee-stung / swollen 
stolen
glances,
sanative—
venom/
what’s yesterday stays, 
an onset
of what the night brings—
sit here, sloppy and free
eat
drink
unfasten
run from your shadow, 
a beast of your pastselves bred to breed more of what mauls,
leave it to die.

The point of daffodils 🌼

I’m sorry
I’m sorry
I’m sorry

I yawned love in all the shades of pastel you own/
I want to paint your infinite so spread your legs,
Show the world how deep you go, you said—

There is not enough paint or sky to hold me, I sigh/

He laughs as he begins to sprout his wings

It’s all in numbers
How we end and how we begin

An angel laughs—but he sings
I’m sorry
I’m sorry
I’m sorry

Apologies are endless and unnecessary
if you’ve already learned that forgiveness can be silent
I’ve seen
You’ve seen a chiseled hand sculpt you into something/mouth gaped open
Not to speak
But to hold the plague of his snake

Skid slink into my feet
My brain/
A music box of screams
Tucked neatly where I bled

I carry traces of my poetry in the morning
as I eat
And in the dusk when I’m asleep

I salivate for food as if I’m starving
Full belly tells a different story
I wonder if the lessons that you taught me come in handy
For when I want love to see me in my shadow
For when I’m dressed up like a clown with rainbows of beige and browns
I don’t eat fruit because it feels too good
Sugar is the same as when I cry and smile and taste the
salt lake house you left me in

I am an old one because you the ancient were inside me
You implanted all your heart and now whenever I love
I wonder if you love it too

I’ve regrown all my teeth
I’ve shoveled out the dirt
I’ve planted all new trees
I am a garden in full bruise

Artist’s Statement on the photos: The pictures are from the Full Moon on December 11, 2019. They were taken inside Joshua Tree National Park.

---

Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins is an immigrant from El Salvador. Her work has been featured in Thimble Literary Magazine, Rabid Oak, Moonchild Magazine, and FIVE:2:ONE amid others. She was the hostess of a monthly poetry reading series, “They’re Just Words” featuring poets from all over L.A. County from 2017-2019. Currently, she runs a literary magazine called “RESURRECTION mag,” where she encourages poets, artists and photographers to show the world their joys and their sorrows. She is the author of thirteen books. She lives in Los Angeles, CA with her husband, painter John Collins.

autumn beloveds: DIY Moon Water Space Cleansing Spray

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

For the entire month of October, I will be posting daily to Luna Luna about all things magical, witchy, spooky, and spoopy. From books and tarot decks to films and random research or rituals I happen upon, I’ll be offering up a little taste of the shadow.

Today, I wanted to share something that I make to cleanse my space of negative or stagnant energies — and to protect it. Since I live in an apartment (and anyone who lives in a city or an apartment knows how many disparate energies and feelings are floating around) it is often easier for me to do this than to use smoke. I also just adore the ritual of it.

Before engaging in ritual or any sort of sacred act (like journaling or visualization) it’s a good idea to cleanse yourself  — and the space of any dull or stagnant or harmful energies. 

An easy-to-make apartment-friendly space-cleansing elixir

You’ll need:

• Large bowl or mason jar of water

• Organic herbs (especially those bought locally or those which are embraced by your ancestors or practice; I like to use rosemary — for its cleansing properties — or lavender — for its soothing and healing scent) or organic essential oils. Try to ethically source your goods if possible and be mindful of pets and roommates’ allergies.

• A water-safe crystal (optional) that I’ll use is rose quartz —to promote love in your space — or clear quartz (within the water) — to clear negative energies.

• A few pinches of salt (any salt will do; many use coarse or sea salt as it’s often on-hand, and some use black salt, which is said to absorb negative energies). Salt is oft-used in protective and cleansing acts across practices.

• A spray bottle with an atomizer. I like to use glass, but anything will do. You can also keep the water in a jar (I also do this often) and use your fingers to spray the water; some of us also like to be physical and use our hands. 

Let the water sit under the moonlight for a whole evening (if you live in an apartment, a windowsill or hidden area where it won’t be disturbed will do). You may place a crystal within the water to soak up the energy of the crystal. Cover the jar or bowl. When placing it under the moonlight, I always ask that the water be blessed and programmed to cleanse, protect, and purify my space. 

You can say this (or, better yet — of course — write your own incantation!): 

May this water be blessed by the light of the moon; that it becomes as the moon is — luminous, capable of the tides of change. May this water be used to cleanse, purify, and create harmony in my space.

PS: You can write this out and tape it to the bottle, too, or draw a sigil on the bottom of the bottle.

Oh, and direct moonlight is hard to come by; my window really only faces another building. If you can’t find the moonlight, just having access to the night sky is enough. In the morning (it’s okay if you get up after dawn breaks, though some folks get up before the first light), collect the water and pour it into a cleansed bottle.

You may drop a few drops of essential oils (careful with pets) or stick a few sprigs of herbs into the bottle. If you have a small enough crystal, you can drop it in as well. Use this spray when the energy, air, or ‘traffic’ becomes stuck, stagnant or tiresome. I recommend opening a window and using this spray elixir in each room and space you inhabit — especially before a ritual or journaling. You can even keep a smaller bottle near your door — with which to spray upon your being when coming in from outside.

Of course, any intentional act is only made better with beautiful, intentional words. If you were to recite an incantation every time you used the spray, what would you say?

You might start with: With this sacred water, this space becomes______, free from _______. 

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Lisa Marie Basile (she/her) is a poet, essayist, editor, and chronic illness awareness advocate living in New York City. She's the founder and creative director of Luna Luna Magazine and its online community, and the creator of Ritual Poetica, a curiosity project dedicated to exploring the intersection of writing, creativity, healing, & sacredness. She regularly creates dialogue and writes about intentionality and ritual, accessibility, creativity, poetry, foster care, mental health, family trauma, healing, and chronic illness. She is the author of THE MAGICAL WRITING GRIMOIRE, LIGHT MAGIC FOR DARK TIMES, and a few poetry collections, including the recent NYMPHOLEPSY, which is excerpted in Best American Experimental Writing 2020.

Her essays and other work can be found in The New York Times, Narratively, Sabat Magazine, We Are Grimoire, Witch Craft Magazine, Refinery 29, Self, Healthline, Entropy, On Loan From The Cosmos, Chakrubs, Catapult, Bust, Bustle, and more. Her work has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes (most recently for her work in Narratively). Lisa Marie has led poetry, writing, and ritual workshops at HausWitch in Salem, MA, Manhattanville College, and Pace University, and she's led ritual and writing events, like Atlas Obscura's renowned Into The Veil. She is also a chronic illness advocate, keeping columns at several chronic illness patient websites. She earned a Masters's degree in Writing from The New School and studied literature and psychology as an undergraduate at Pace University. You can follow her at @lisamariebasile 

Poetry by Olaitan Humble

BY OLAITAN HUMBLE

Hope Against Hope

& then we watch as our new year prayers morph into

cries & wails of lost loved ones—the ones who

used to hold our tongues together with fine threads of their

sanity but what can a prayer do than to cause

coincidences to or not to happen? a bird's flight

draws my mother to the sky but it is dangerous out there

now she turns to her gadget to fuel her fear with pictures

painted by __________ here in a multiverse where

help is nigh where nature is not buried under whispers of

different languages where paradise is a few blocks away

from home where loving is a civil responsibility where the

night sky still casts a shadow

The Map of my Country as a Portrait of Woe on a Landscape

Here is where we build castles in the air // we start

by calling our forefathers bastards for keeping

us away from a world of distorted songs. We were

told that there is a paradise below our soil // an

unnoticed picture on the map of our country by the

other side of the wall they built before eloping

with their shadows into deep waters // somewhere

along the contour lines on our map there is an

unheard voice calling for the wrath of the gods.

There is a letter waiting at a post office written

by a sender that never was // those who were born

dead & buried into the night sky smiling.

& all the nights letters like this are read // woe

in form of killer bees pinch our wrist & then

we say the same words our fathers did on the day

they lost the fight to the motherland & died // & now

we wake up to listen to the irregular rhythm of the cries we

chant as anthem // we listen as they blow with the cold

winds illustrated on our map within a landscape.

Olaitan Humble is a Nigerian poet and pacifist who likes to collect quotations and astrophotos. He won the People's Choice Award at EW Poetry Prize Awards 2020, March edition of Loudthotz Poetry Open Reading 2020 and JustDeen Poetry Contest. Poetry Editor at Invincible Quill Magazine, his works are featured and/or are forthcoming in Dreich, Crêpe & Penn, Wine Cellar Press, The B'K, Words & Whispers, Giallo, AGNG Mag, CỌ́N-SCÌÒ, Periwinkle, Doubleback Review, The African Writers Review, Ngiga Review, Cultural Weekly, EroGospel, Konya ShamsRumi, POEMIFY, the QuillS, The Wanderlust Literary Journal, First Gong Anthology and Boys Are Not Stones Anthology II, among others. He is a Features Editor at Urban Central and tweets @olaitanhumble.

A Poem by Peg Aloi

BY PEG ALOI

The Apples

The apples my father brought were large

perfect, juicy, crunchy and sweet

red, delicious

in purple cardboard egg carton boxes

that he bought for clients

his generosity a beacon

amidst our constant struggles to make ends meet.

The apples my mother made pies with were grasshopper green

big and round, super tart, Northern Spy

baked to mushy sweetness

spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg

filling the afternoon with a warm fragrance of love and care

that rose above

the damp lingering sadness and fear of the morning.

The apples we picked in the local orchard

by the horse farm that smelled faintly of manure

and strongly of fresh-cut hay

were burnished by sunshine

red and green and yellow

Macintosh, Golden Delicious, Jonathan, Cortland

tumbled into bushel baskets

riding home in the back of the station wagon

like treasure, like gold

shining autumn days

when we learned what farms were

where food came from

what happiness was made of.

The apples my witchcraft told me of

were shining like round red planets

cosmic throbbing pomes

the color of blood and roses

their plump poisonous seeds bursting

with fairy tales, myths, secrets, curses and wishes

their crisp, fragrant, juicy flesh

tasting of this moment, and of immortality.

Peg Aloi is a freelance writer, film & TV critic, professional gardener, traditional singer, practicing witch, and lover of apples and orchards. Her book The Witching Hour: How Witchcraft Enchanted Popular Culture, will come out in 2021.