3 Poems by Kimberly Grabowski Strayer

BY KIMBERLY GRABOWSKI STRAYER

Back Together 

No ghosts without walls. In every horror 

story, a haunted edifice. A house can be a home 

or a trap. Gulp of water or skipping record. 

In this scene, two teenage girls use witchcraft 

to build a boyfriend out of body parts. 

I say out loud why didn’t I think of this. They do 

everything Frankenstein doesn’t do—teach 

their creation to speak, how to touch. He knows 

his body is not original, but the girls take the gun 

from his hands. Kiss him on the mouth. They all go 

to bed together, both dead and alive, 

undifferentiated. The resurrection means pushing 

oblivion up through the throat by leaning all her 

weight on the stomach. I think—this is what love is. 

I think—I could watch resurrection all day. I’m tired 

of dismemberment. Reassemble the life force, 

help it cough up the dirt. Dying here only means 

an aesthetic shift—the teen wakes up and says I need 

a cigarette. Light me up. Show me the movie 

that puts the body back together. I’ve suspended 

my disbelief so much, now I believe in anything. 

Spell for Clarity

After Marosa di Giorgio 

The solution must be to eat 

a Petoskey stone. Round from this ice continent. 

A slow-carve. The daytime Petoskey stone is dry, 

looks brittle, like an ordinary limestone shucked 

from the cliff. The daytime Petoskey stone 

is my childhood collarbone, broken in a bike 

race and grown back bowed. Ordinary breaking. 

For this, I need the nocturnal stone—

its many eyes. Colonies of fossilized coral 

glittering through the grey. We coat the stones

with lake water to render them vulnerable. 

Something found only in Michigan, 

can you believe that? When we were little, 

the adults told us staying in Superior

for too long, the cold would kill us fast. 

Pretty little things. It's too cold there for anything 

to survive. And the water is so safe to drink. 

We washed our long hair in it, counting down 

the minutes to nerve damage. The eye 

of the Petoskey stone gazing all 

the way down into our inkwells. 

In high school, a boy drowned in the lake—

undercurrent wiped him clean. All the news reports

repeated how strong he was, how all his life 

he trained for this. Eat the Petoskey stone, quick. 

Diamond of bone. Gravity of gray. A boat tour 

of the great shipwrecks. For this, the daytime stone 

will not do. You need something colder than ice. So 

cold it feels like so many final breaths in your hand. 

I think—no, don't pay your hard-earned money 

for these tours. What kind of wreckage will you see? 

What is left there, in the deepest lake? Swallow. 

Make of yourself a glass-bottomed boat. 

Annabelle

children still want/ some facsimile baby/ tuck it in at night/ tote around by plastic foot or hand/ most of us have soft middles/ puffed cotton where a beating/ could be/ the human part of me/ catches/ at that mechanism/ causes you to look/ for a face/ in the margins/ how the haunting begins/ that hunt for features/ a taking care/ making sense/ humanness and all the trappings/ little replica/ little glass eye/ I just want someone to take/ care of me/ instead get tossed around/ undressed/ set a place for me/ at the table/ stitch a story in my mouth/ in the movie/ play placeholder girl/ who keeps coming back/ every time you throw her away/ I don’t move/ but kill/ I come back/ make you sit upright/ stop blinking/ at the screen/ to see the whole dark/ make the audience/ say why would anyone want that/ creepy dirty doll/ where did she come from/ where is her lock/ why does she keep coming back/ it’s best if you turn out all the lights/ and name me something sweet/ so everything you killed/ for your little girl/ will come back 

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Kimberly Grabowski Strayer is a poet and horsewoman from Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she received her B.A. in English Writing from Kalamazoo College. She holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from The University of Pittsburgh. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Superstition Review, Midwestern Gothic, Cleaver Magazine, Crab Fat Magazine, and others. Her chapbook, Afterward, is available from Dancing Girl Press. 

The Ghost in the Green House

BY JC DRAKE

It always begins the same way: my eyes pop open, my mind is awake, but I cannot move my limbs or open my mouth.  A wave of fear passes over me, my heart begins to race, and I think the same thing – I’ve died and this is the last few moments of consciousness, before my life slips away.  Thus far, that hasn’t been the case.  Usually after a few terrifying seconds, my limbs unstiffen and I am able to move.  

This is sleep paralysis.  It’s a condition that afflicts about three million people in the United States and which has only begun to be understood within the last few years.  Essentially, many of us will wake up out of a deep, dreaming sleep immediately without going through the various stages of wakefulness.  The human body naturally has a self-defense mechanism that keeps us from moving excessively during sleep and an episode of sleep paralysis is triggered when we come out of sleep but that mechanism is still active.  In short, we become conscious again before our bodies are capable of movement.  

I’ve been experiencing it my entire life, now more than forty years.  The first episode I recall is actually one of my earliest memories.  I awoke in my bed, lying on my side, but was totally frozen.  I tried to scream out – in my brain I was yelling – but no sound came out of my mouth.  When my body was once again able to move, I screamed my head off.  My parents didn’t understand what had happened, and told me I had just had a bad dream.  But I wasn’t dreaming, I was fully awake.  

This condition on its own is terrifying enough.  After hundreds of episodes I’ve become used to it, or as used to it as a person can be when they suddenly find themselves paralyzed.  But not every episode is the same; sometimes, well, I see things.  

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That, too, began when I was a child, lying in bed frozen from another episode of sleep paralysis.  In the corner I would often see a dark figure, not much taller than a child, huddled in the corner of the room.  As the episode continued I would see it stand up and walk quickly towards me, before I finally fully awoke and was able to move.  Nothing was there after all – but I’d seen it.  This usually meant sleeping with the light on for the next few nights.  

Again, neuroscience has an explanation for these terrible visages.  Due to the rapid wakening process, not only is the body not fully away but the conscious mind is still partially in a dream state.  As such, we will see our “dreams” as something present and terrible in our physical space.  I am a skeptical person and inclined to believe the rational explanation when one is on offer, but I’ve never been fully satisfied with this aspect of the sleep paralysis diagnosis.  

Why is it that throughout history we so often see the same things, across cultures?  Dark shadowy figures, little imps and demons, images of terror.  Why doesn’t my half asleep mind project an image of a cooked breakfast or my wife smiling from the corner of the room?  Why did I see dark, shadowy things crawling out of the walls at age 4 and why do I still see them at age 44?  It never changes, no matter how old I get, where I live, or what my mental state is.  

It was actually this question, as a young person, that got me interested in studying what we might call the “paranormal,” though I’m really not fond of that term.  I grew up in a family that came from a long tradition of rural Southern folktales and folk magic.  To say they were superstitious is an understatement.  I grew up believing I was seeing ghosts and with access to no other information, that’s what I came to believe.  In time I developed a more nuanced approach, largely through investigating cases of hauntings, from talking to other people, and, indeed, from obtaining an education in the sciences.  When the lights are on and I am fully awake I can embrace the scientific reality of it all, but when I am again frozen in terror and a black hand is reaching out for me from the shadows, the rational explanation offers no comfort.  

There is one incident that stands out from the others in terms of its effect on me, because it turned out to be prophetic.  More than just an episode of sleep paralysis, this incident became a ghost story.  As a result, my skepticism has never fully recovered.       

We bought our house in York, Pennsylvania as a retreat from Washington, DC and the cramped Beltway lifestyle.  Don’t get me wrong, I love working in DC, I just don’t much care for living here.  As lovers of history, antiques, and everything old and weird, York proved to be absolutely the best spot for us to set down roots.  A crumbling steel town slowly going through a hipster-fueled revival, it’s not for everyone.  But my wife and I fell in love with the place from the moment we first drove into town and had purchased a house in an historic neighborhood within two months of first deciding to settle there.  

Our realtor never showed us the house on her own – we had to find it ourselves.  When we told her we were looking for something “historic,” she never quite got the message and continued to show us places that, while nominally old from the outside, had all the modern feel of a whitewashed home in the suburbs.  But that’s not what we wanted.  My wife found the Green House and had to force the realtor to take us there.  

It’s a three story row house, twice as tall as it is wide, in a working class neighborhood near one of the country’s first industrial cat litter factories.  Charming.  Built around 1877 when Reconstruction-era industry arrived in York, the house is in various phases of remodel.  The parlor is just as it would have been in 1877 and so is the master bedroom and the office.  The servant’s quarters upstairs are remodeled and make a fine TV room and one of the smaller bedrooms has been turned into an unpleasantly cheerful modern bathroom.  The radiators are all original, the pipes are exposed on the walls.  On a good day, the electricity will stay on until bedtime without tripping a breaker.  

We fell in love with place immediately, even though the realtor refused to even go upstairs.   Our offer was accepted and within a couple of weeks we were moving in.  It was within that first month that I saw the ghost.  

The Green House is disconcerting. Haphazard attempts to remodel it have left it full of dark corners and blind turns.  The stairs are particularly bothersome.  When standing on the stairs it is impossible to see what is around the corner in the hallway at the top.  When lying in bed in the master bedroom, one can see all the way down that same hallway, but cannot see what is coming up the stairs.  This creates a funhouse effect in which one sitting in the parlor or lying in the bedroom is confronted with the staircase, but cannot see what’s coming up or down it.  

The house is noisy – it’s a row house in the city and it shakes and rattles like all old houses do.  But the stairs have a sound all their own; something walks those stairs, usually late at night but often in broad daylight.  Due to their odd construction it’s possible to hear the sound of walking, but to never see what is there.  Except for that night, shortly after we moved in, that I believe I saw it.  Or rather, her.  

I was asleep on my left side in bed, my wife snoring away behind me, the cats snuggled at our feet.  Something had woken me up rapidly from a very deep sleep, as is often the case with an episode of sleep paralysis.  I couldn’t move, I was frozen stiff, my arms folded in front of me, forced to stare down that long, dark hallway, lit only by the street lights outside.  I could hear the sound, the footsteps on the stairs, slowly and gently climbing.  And then, there emerged a figure.  
She was a little girl, thin with black hair and narrow features, her mouth drawn together tightly, no older than 14.  She was dressed in a kind of night gown made of red and white material like gingham.  I could see her face and hands but not her feet.  She wasn’t fully visible – she was like a photograph projected on mist.  She seemed surprised to see us laying there in bed, the door open.  

I saw her and she saw me and in my mind I began to scream.  Then my limbs started to move, my mouth fell open, and I was awake.  The girl was gone.  

I got up, explored the hallway, used the bathroom, and went back to bed.  I spent the rest of the night playing with my phone, one eye on that hallway.  Shortly thereafter I switched to the other side of the bed; my wife is a heavy sleeper and has never been disturbed.  

I chalked the experience up to just another bout of sleep paralysis.  We adopted the “ghost” as our own in a joking way to make ourselves feel better any time something went bump in the night.  Somehow the weirdness of the house was easier to explain with a personality – even an imaginary one – attached to it.  I even came up with a little nursery rhyme about her that begins: 

I am the ghost that walks the stairs,

Tread carefully or you’ll join me there.

Thus we lived happily in the Green House, enjoying what precious weekends we could afford to spend there, all the while making it our own.  I haven’t seen the ghost again, though the sound of footsteps remains.  In the summer of the third year we decided to rip out our backyard and turn it into an English-style garden, with fire pit, rocky path, and flower beds instead of the grass we had to cut.  It was while putting in one of those flower beds that we found the grave.  

An oblong circle of concrete, decorated with inlaid seashells and chunks of white crystal, it’s about four feet wide and four feet deep.  It is a solid concrete vault clearly dug out and built in a hurry by an amateur.  We began excavating it after lunch on a Saturday, not fully understanding what it was until we got it cleared out.  It was full of bricks and lumps of coal all the way down to the bottom.  There was no body, but there was fragments of bone and that’s when I realized what we’d found.  Someone else had done the same thing as us, stumbled across the grave and excavated it.  But they had found the body and had it moved, we hoped, to a proper burial place.  

We left the bone in place and removed the bricks for use as a fence liner.  Then we turned the grave into a pond, lining it and sealing it up so that it would not be forgotten, but would also be a more pleasant part of the landscape.  

I found only one thing that gave any clue as to the identity of the former occupant: a small square of red and white gingham.

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JC Drake has a day job with the federal government, but has a passion for researching unsolved mysteries.  He and his wife Vickie travel frequently, are the parents of two adorable cats, and divide their time between Silver Spring, Maryland and York, Pennsylvania, where they continue to reside, along with the ghost, in the Green House.  If you have a paranormal encounter or a mystery that needs solving, you can contact Dr. Drake at drake.investigates@gmail.com

Growing up with Ghosts: Memoirs from my Haunted House

BY MELISSA MADARA

It was a chilly, late-fall evening when I broke into my childhood home. The process felt mechanical, even trancelike. I used a screwdriver to pop a window frame on the porch, while my friends hung back at the edge of the property until I gave the all-clear. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I tumbled through the porch window into the house- now silent, cold, and dark, yet still heartbreakingly familiar- but it definitely wasn’t ghosts.

We sold the house in 2013, as a stipulation of my parent’s divorce agreement. It sat empty and decaying for two years afterward, the gutters falling off and the lawn overgrown, before it was leveled for new construction in 2016. It was always strange seeing the house like that in the frequent visits I made back to the lot, but it always remained a talismanic object for me- symbolic of the entire lives lived within its walls, and often seeming to breathe with a life of its own.

In a way, this was true. For as long as I can remember, the house had been haunted. I don’t mean this in some metaphorical, poetic way. I can count on one hand the amount of times my best friend agreed to sleep over, and she still recounts stories of sleep paralysis, disembodied knocking, and the unsettling sound of movement within the walls. My mother’s boyfriend once ran screaming from the house in the middle of the night after seeing an apparition seated at the foot of my bed. If I invited boys over for teenage shenanigans, they would find a way to leave by dusk. Our house had a storied reputation, and there were always more stories being written.

The earliest memory I have of experiencing our haunting (or hauntings, perhaps, because it took so many forms) was of the footsteps on our staircase. This was always the most obvious and consistent aspect of the haunting, and occurred nearly every night until we finally left. They were the heavy footsteps of the last patriarch of the house- a toweringly tall man we knew as Walter. Every night, Walter methodically plodded up and down our stairs, as if on patrol. The door of my childhood bedroom opened right to the top of the staircase, which gave me a unique vantage of the footstep phenomenon, and the absolute nothingness attached to the sound.

There was also disembodied knocking from within the walls. Lights would flicker on cue, especially when discussing the haunting. Sleep paralysis and night terrors were common. Certain rooms would give off icy chills, or the unsettling feeling of being watched. Objects would move, vibrate, throw themselves across rooms, or even disappear completely, only to reappear in plain sight months later. Apparitions were frequent occurrences- from previous tenants, to strange and horrifying patches of living darkness, to unfamiliar characters- human and animal alike. We had a particularly odd three month stretch where every guest to the house would repeatedly ask “when did you guys get a cat?” We never did.

It’s amazing what you can normalize over time. As a family, we engaged with the haunting on a near daily basis, but except for a few rare and animated occurrences, I don’t recall us being scared or unsettled at home. We even frequently engaged with the haunting, though this mostly amounted to yelling “SHUT THE FUCK UP” at Walter’s ceaseless all-night stair climbing. The supernatural nature of our house was integrated into the mundanity of our lives.

That was, until the Black Thing arrived.

I’ve always been prone to exceptionally high fevers, usually breaking 104 but once rising to a life threatening 107. These temperatures have brought vivid and terrifying hallucinations since I was a teenager, but the first time I saw the Black Thing, it was no hallucination. I was a senior in high school and up very late with a fever, perhaps past midnight. My mother woke up to give me medicine to reduce the heat, and she had just slipped back to bed. In my delirium, I was absently staring out my door and into the hallway, when the darkness seemed to gather and coalesce, densely and thickly, like ink in water. The seething blackness gathered into a vaguely humanoid shape with arms and legs- well over six feel tall. The Black Thing took what could be called a step forward, and placed what might have been a hand on the frame of my doorway, using it to let itself in. It then appeared to crouch next to my bed, staring eyelessly into my face. I summoned my strength, flicked on my bedside lamp, and called for my mother as loud as I could. She immediately ran into my room, eyes wide, and asked “You saw that, too?”

Whatever it was, the Black Thing became an unwelcome fixture outside my bedroom door. Its presence spread an uneasy air through the house, and seemed to affect the mechanics of our interpersonal interactions, as well as the original haunting in the home. We fought more as a family, and felt driven apart. I fell into an acute depression. We began to hear Walter’s footsteps not just at night, but following immediately behind when we ascended the stairs, as if chasing us. Living, dead, or otherwise- the Black Thing’s presence affected us all.

It became so severe that my mother tried to exorcise it herself once when my sister and I were at school. She began by issuing statements of intent, stating that the house was her domain and she wasn’t about to let some shifty shadow prick scare her children. She used burning herbs and sea salt to begin cleansing the house, but only got so far. In the middle of the process, she recalls the TV flicking on to static and then shutting off, after which she fell violently ill, vomiting in the kitchen sink until she was exhausted and could not continue. She was still visibly shaken when we returned home that afternoon.

That week, I took a free period to cross the street from my high school to a Passionist monastery, where I consulted a priest on the issue. He blessed a crucifix for us that I still have in my home, sent me on my way with some holy water and a pat on the head. I took these objects home, and while they seemed to help us set up stronger boundaries with the Black Thing, it never fully disappeared, though never troubled us so severely again, either. I wish there was a more cinematic ending to this story, but there isn’t. It’s existence faded into something we experienced and coped with, but were never again terrorized by. As I said earlier, it’s amazing the kind of things you can normalize and learn to live with.

As an adult, I’ve done my share of research about what the Black Thing could have been. I have my theories, but ultimately I don’t think I’ll never know. Could it have been a “shadow person”- a common yet unexplainable figure of spooky folklore? Could it have been an egregore- an autonomous manifestation- of the shared trauma of my parent’s divorce? Could it have been a demon, or something more sinister? Was it the spirit of a person who had died? Had it ever been alive? While I don’t have answers, I do have the experience that we all shared in that house, and it’s something that I hope will embolden and prepare me should I ever encounter a similar fiend again.

When I revisited the house that fall and broke in, I wasn’t driven to reconnect with these old haunts. I was nostalgic for my youth, and wanted to curl up in my old bedroom and spend a night feeling at home for the first time since I moved out. When I clumsily tumbled in through that window and dusted myself off, I wasn’t thinking about ghosts. But as I looked up and through the windows that peered from the porch into our old living room, sure as shit, there they were- as if I had just interrupted a tea party. There were several faint and humanoid shadows, facing me, all leaning at odd and unsettling angles like crooked teeth. And smack in the middle, of course, was the towering Black Thing. They were all just as I remembered experiencing them, and now seemed a bit harmless- maybe even welcoming. There was something very familiar in that moment that erased anything that might have been spooky for someone else. We always shared that house with other worlds, and it felt almost nice to come home to a spectral welcoming committee.

I called for my friends and helped them through the window, and when I looked back, the ghosts were gone. Maybe they were just for me to see, who knows? We turned on our flash lights and I opened the unlocked porch door, which swung open into familiar darkness. I was blessed to be able to spend one final night exploring the haunted house I grew up in before it was demolished. Most importantly, I’m grateful that I had the change to finally say my goodbyes- to my youth in that house, the years we spent living there, and the numberless strange creatures we shared it with.

Rituals to Fully Embrace the Samhain Season

BY MELISSA MADARA

For many witches the world over, Samhain is a particularly precious time in the wheel of the year. It takes place after sundown on October 31st, as a midway between the Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice and the start of the dark half of the year. The name Samhain (pronounces SOW-in) comes from the Celtic pagan tradition, but the holiday goes by other names throughout the UK- Kalan Gwav in Cornwall, Ysbrydnos or Nos Galan Haf in Wales, Hop-tu-Naa on the Isle of Man, and of course Halloween through much of the English speaking world.

For many, this day is regarded as a liminal time when the veil or barrier between the seen and the unseen world is at its thinnest, and communication or travel between the two realms is most possible. Samhain hinges between two celestial polarities- light and dark, warmth and cold, life and death- and in this way, acts as a portal to spiritual worlds, bringing communication, initiation, travel, and contact.

The spirits who manifest themselves in this place could be family members, ancient ghosts, or even a host of fairies and supernatural creatres referred to in Irish mythology as the Aos Si. To keep these spirits at bay, great bonfires are lit as a cleansing and protective measure, and offerings of food and drink are left out to appease the spirits in hopes that they will act as protectors during the cold winter ahead. Pumpkins, or more traditionally turnips, are carved into toothy grins, filled with candles, and carried or placed at the door as talismanic objects to protect its owner from these spirits. Celebrants wear costumes and masks to blend in with the wandering spirits, so they may safely travel the night among them.

For witches, this time is particularly useful for engaging in spirit work, ancestor veneration, exalting the earth, or connecting with the Otherworld. Even if you don’t come from the Celtic or Pagan traditions, the magic of this time is open to you, because its mysteries are primal. Liminal spaces have been regarded as portals to other realms across history and the globe, and are a common theme through many traditions that seek to walk between these realms.

Below are a few brief and inter-traditional rituals for accessing different aspects of the Samhain season. They should be accessible to new witches but also engaging for experienced practitioners, and provide access to just a few of the spiritual treasures that this festival has to offer. I encourage you to enter them with a pure heart and a willingness to explore, as both are required to breech these other worlds, and the spiritual, uncanny landscapes beyond.

GET TO KNOW THE SPIRITS AROUND YOU

Many magical traditions honor the concept of genius loci, or “spirits of place.” Depending upon your tradition, these can be the spirits of your home, the land it sits on, the trees and plants around it, or the litany of spirits that have inhabited and walked this space before you. The benefits of fostering relationships with these types of spirits can range from home protection to gaining knowledge of the spiritual landscape in which you reside, but it’s also always a good idea to be a good neighbor. 

To initiate contact with these spirits, prepare a suitable offering. This could be a feast of natural, earth-based foods (apples, spirits, fresh bread), a beautiful altar decked with objects from your home or neighborhood, beeswax candles, or something simple like sweet smelling incense. Set this in a prepared space and turn out all of the lights in your home.

Prepare an strong herbal bath. I tend to use cedar boughs and birch bark when I work with spirits of place, but you may find it more useful to prepare a brew of local plants, stones, and sacred herbs. Strain this brew and either add it to your bath, or add it to temperate water in a large pot and pour it over your head, baptism-style. This water should be patted off gently and not dried thoroughly, and bathing should always occur by candlelight. If you would like to dress afterward, have clean, comfortable clothes prepared.

On leaving your bath, approach your altar space and light any candles or incense. Sit back and allow the darkness of the room to cloak and envelop you. Speak your name into this place, and your intentions for fostering these relationships. Let these spirits know they are welcome, and how they can best make themselves manifest to you. Ask them if there are offerings they like, or methods of contact that are most effective. Ask them how you can be of service to them, and how they can be of service to you. Talk all night if you like, or simple share communal space with one another.

When it is time to leave, I like to break bread. I take a piece of bread or fruit and break it in half, eating half and leaving the other on the altar. I leave the candles and incense burning all night, and in the morning, I carry leftover offerings and wax to a crossroads, riverbank, or the edge of the forest (being careful not to leave inorganic materials in nature).

HONOR YOUR BELOVED DEAD

Ancestor magic has powerful benefits for the practitioner, being that blood is shared between the spirits and oneself. When we talk about ancestor spirits, we don’t just mean the ones you can name. The term refers to millennia of births and deaths that lead to your existence. This can also refer to non-blood ancestors, such as the lineage of witches in your tradition. Initiating contact with these spirits should be easy because of lineage, but also may be difficult in the event of ancestral trauma. These spirits usually have a lot to say, and it is best to listen closely and with reverence.

My ancestor altar is a permanent installation in my home, and is made up of several parts. I have many old film photographs of my family, dating back three generations. My preferred offering to familial spirits is a glass of water, a piece of chocolate, and small dish containing honey and olive oil, but these will vary family to family. If you’re unsure of what to offer, a glass of water and a white candle never really go wrong.

I also encourage you to build a physical place for these spirits to reside. This could be a clay jar, a ceramic skull, a wooden box, or a wax poppet, but the role is to create a vessel for spirit to be housed and live in your space. These vessel can be filled with your personal concerns (hair or blood are nice choices), red thread, necromantic herbs (marshmallow root is my fave), white eggshell, soil from graveyards (particular where family is inferred), frankincense, and other non-perishables that seem appropriate. You may interact with this object as a physical extension of your ancestral spirits, and feed it when appropriate.

You may also find it useful, especially if there is strong ancestral trauma in your lineage, to employ the assistance of a psychopomp, or a spirit that can cross between worlds. Common choices are Hermès or Hecate from the Greco Roman pantheons, but family spirits that you have strong connections to are also good choices. I often use my childhood dog for this purpose. 

You may choose to veil this altar when it is not in use, as it can be intensely personal. Black or white are good color choices, and any natural fabric will do. I use white vintage lace.

In my experience, these relationships (like most family) gain their richness over time and repeated interaction. Offer them a portion of your dinner each night. Share the joys and the sorrows of your life with them. Ask for advice and favors, but be sure to return the favors when given. Work to investigate and heal ancestral trauma where it is present. Seek out the other witches in your family line. Map your family tree. Stay engaged in the work of maintaining both your living and dead family, and the rewards of support will amaze you.

PREPARE FOR THE WINTER AHEAD

As witches, we can understand the turning of seasons on both a physical and archetypal level. As the earth wanes into darkness, we can similarly engage in a spiritual introspection- turning our focus inward, and weighing what works and what doesn’t in our lives. It is a time when the choices that do not serve us truly show their faces, and where we can more easily access the wild & intuitive nature of our spiritual selves to seek out better pathways.

The Samhain season is an excellent time to begin this sort of work in preparation for both the literal and symbolic winters ahead. Deepening our relationship with our intuitive nature and confronting our devilish, harmful “shadow” selves are parts of the great work of witchcraft, so anytime is a good time to start, but the liminal space provided by Samhain gives us a unique perspective. Just as darkness and light can simultaneously inhabit the container of Samhain without judgement, so too can we hold space for both of these aspects of our selves, and examine them without fear or shame. It is the nature of liminal spaces like these to hold space for opposites, not to force moral values on them, and harnessing this potential is incredibly useful.

A skill that I’ve found helpful in discerning between the needs of the intuitive, soulful self and the wants of the shadow self is turning the spiritual ear to the voice of both parts. There is a quote by a medieval Christian monk who said that at night, angels and devils would appear to him, but sometimes the devils would appear as angels and the angels would appear as devils. When asked how he tells them apart, he said you can only tell by how you feel when they’ve left you. The same is true for these two parts of the self. The voice of the intuitive nature is soulful and deep. It is how we feel when we are moved by artwork, or when we feel our sense of place in the world, or when we appreciate nature, or when we engage in work aligned with our soul’s purpose. The voice of the shadow self is driven by fear and anxiety, and seeks revenge, dominance, isolation, and judgement of others. When the soulful voice speaks, we are called into action, we are moved to passion, and we fall in love. When the shadow self speaks, we worry, we tremble, and we lose sleep.

A ritual I’ve found for engaging these two selves is one I learned while I was living in India. In a modified version of this ritual, the practitioner should sit in as much darkness as can be gathered, particularly in a place that inspires a little bit of fear. Basements or closets work well for this. The practitioner should enter a meditative state, and call into this place all the things they fear most- people who have wronged them, deepest fears about themselves, traumas, demons, wrathful gods, serpents, spiders, lions, tigers, and bears. They should focus on calling these creatures into their space, and inviting them to feast on the practitioners spirit and body. The practitioner should focus on visualizing this feast in detail, and hold space for the feelings that arise. Cry, scream, and agonize through the experience.

In my experience, there comes a breakthrough point at the crescendo of fear when a new voice emerges. A soulful and light voice, that cuts through the chaos of the others. It understands the soulful self as independent from these ego-driven terrors, and banishes them. It is self assured and possesses the capacity to offer the deepest healing. Crying may turn to laughter. The participant should stay in this place as long as they would like, until they feel ready to leave. 

It is nice to have prepared a drink and small snack after ritual to help the participant return to their bodies. Journaling, drawing, or automatic writing can help process the experience, but the important takeaway should be the discernment between the two voices that both inhabit the self. You will always know them by how you feel when they leave you.

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5 Ghostly Films to Settle Into This Halloween Season

BY TIFFANY SCIACCA

I've always had a soft spot for a good ghost story. From a slow-burner like The Others, to the fun and quirky The Frighteners, there is just something about the genre as a whole that has always appealed to me. Though there are newer films I have enjoyed—Rigor Mortis, Haunter, and Ghost Stories, I’ve decided to share some of my favorites from the 70s and 80s—with one cheat, because I love it so much I always recommend it!

Ghost Story

The first offering is Ghost Story, a 1981 film directed by John Irvin and adapted from a story written by Peter Straub. It stars silver screen legends, Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and John Houseman. Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that it is about a group of college roommates brought together as old men after the death of a friend who then forced to come to terms with the horrible secret that has tormented them all.

Lady In White

In Lady In White (1988) written and directed by Frank Laloggia, Lukas Hass stars as a young Frankie Scarlatti, who witnesses a crime that has already happened and is attacked shortly after. While recovering, he discovers the dark connection between the two events. There is a bond formed between Frankie and the victim that is endearing as he seeks to bring her killer to justice. This is spun like a dark, coming of age, fairytale—but I can’t tell you if there is a happy ending or not. With Len Cariou, Alex Rocco and Katherine Helmond also starring, Lady in White received positive reviews when it debuted and was considered a good suspense film that “did not rely on gore.” 

The Fog

I wasn’t going to include The Fog, because everyone includes The Fog. But clearly, it’s on everyone’s list for good reason, so I decided why not? Starring Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, and John Houseman (again!,) Janet Leigh and Hal Holbrook, this John Carpenter and Debra Hill film also centers on a dark secret. Like they say, “What is done in the darkness comes out in the light.” (Actually, I just googled it and apparently, I misquoted that, but I am keeping it in!)

I love this movie because it’s a perfect ghost story that never grows old. I mean really, who doesn’t think about The Fog whenever a bank rolls in? Even when I was in Sicily, and witnessed a phenomenon called “Lupo di Mare”—a quick moving fog that envelops everything—I thought of this movie. I watched it swallow as much of my town as I could see and it scared the life out of me!

Don’t Look Now

Don’t Look Now is a last-minute switchout because I had not seen The Haunting of Julia in such a long time, I didn’t feel comfortable recommending it and did not have the time to watch it again. Starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, Don’t Look Now was directed by Nicholas Roeg and is an adaption of Daphne du Maurier’s short story of the same name. Don’t Look Now is a story bookended with tragedies and deals with a couple’s grieving process after the loss of their only daughter. There are of course more layers to this film then an Opera cake, but I don’t want to give anything away, except for these shots. 

The Devil’s Backbone

My last recommendation is from 2001 and was directed by Guillermo del Toro. The Devil’s Backbone stars Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, and Federico Luppi. It is a gothic horror set in 1930s Spain at the tail end of the Spanish Civil War and follows the relationships between an older couple who run an orphanage sheltering the children of the military and government, their younger employees as well as a newly arrived resident who begins having visions of a ghostly orphan. The Devil’s Backbone has been compared to The Others but is infused with a thicker melancholy and is really a moody and beautiful film that needs to be seen at least once!  All of these suggestions can be viewed on YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play and many other sites, so if you can, squeeze one, two or all of these onto your Halloween Movie watchlist and enjoy!

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Tiffany Sciacca is a writer who has recently moved to Sicily from the Midwest. Her work has appeared in the Silver Birch Press, SOFTBLOW and DNA Magazine UK. When she is not learning a new language or trying to blend in, she is reading horror anthologies, binging on Nordic Noir or plugging away at her first Giallo screenplay. @EustaceChisholm

5 Ghost Poems by Catherine Kyle

BY CATHERINE KYLE

For Ghosts  

This one’s for the ghosts

alive 

or dead 

or in whatever state.

You need it? Then

this one’s for you. 

An honorary

ghoul. 

If candles won’t light

get new candles. Throw 

the old ones out. 

If words you have sung

form architecture 

windows and pillars 

shadows and beams 

that haunts you, well then

burn it down. Light 

the bouquet, 

pansies and forget-me-nots 

all blazing.

Touch it to

the load-bearing walls

now. Cast 

your corsage in. 

Dig a grave of soot

and ash and 

lie in it. 

And watch. 

A Garden Ghost 

A ghost revisits 

the body of a girl,

a skeleton, now

with lace gloves. 

The ghost sheds ghost tears

one two three 

that plunk the bony ribs.

Clean and blue as buttons, like

a silky workday blouse. 

The ghost turns on the garden hose

and does not turn it off.

irresponsible 

unreliable 

groundskeeper 

if you ask me.

The water fills up 

thyme and nettle beds,

the poison ivy. 

Fish swim by and huddle in

her sternum and 

her hips.

A River Ghost

I want to talk 

to the river but the river 

is either silent or 

roaring. No in

-between, no inside 

voice. It pouts 

or throws my things.

Already it has broken 

thirteen teacups wrapped in paper, 

gold-kissed rims and 

painted cobalt landscapes  

jigsaw crunch. 

The river does not speak

in words. It speaks 

in overflowings. Creeping 

over sandy shores 

and soaking my new boots. 

It will not talk 

to me, it will not talk

to me, it will not tell 

me what 

it wants. It wants

to be angry, 

I think. It wants 

to Cubist all

my mirrors. 

Look at me, it seems to growl.

My face: a rippled blot. 

A Family Ghost

Ghost girl touches the family

photograph, edges creased, gnawed

-on by time. Runs her pointer 

finger down the silky paper 

seam. It crosses the breast 

of a woman, fold a sash imitating 

quiver. Echo of what weaponry

she might have gripped and shot. 

Ghost girl knows many weapons 

are invisible. Knows many injuries 

are guarded under tongues.

The woman’s face is stalwart, 

mouth a heart monitor 

with no pulse. Ghost girl wants 

to climb inside, to interview 

her teeth. What was your life like?

What would you have wished 

you could demolish? What would you 

have saved, had you power? How was it, 

your pre-ghost? 

A Messy Ghost

You know how they say

you can’t die in a dream? 

This 

is just like that. You’re not 

awake, but there’s nowhere

to go. So park it. And adapt. 

Welcome to the liminal, 

survival’s purgatory. Survival is  

all liminal, a temporary stop. (Yet)

I want to know your breed of this, 

your verbing, your endurance. 

Tell me of your tinctures, 

your spit-shined artillery.

Tell me of the herbs you crush 

and slather as a poultice. Tell me

of the cloak you wear as you 

shoulder the cold. Enter this forest.

See your breath rise into arms of cedars. 

These are territories of things unforgotten

that cannot be healed, either. Here, we all

survive. Welcome to the emptied drawer,

the thousand haystacks scattered. 

Weave them, now, all back together. 

Sort the fleeing parts. 

Stop Screaming: A Short Story

BY CARLEA HOLL-JENSEN

The sky is black milk and the clouds are ash. Along one side of the road, the trees are indistinguishable from the stone hills rising behind them. On the other side, the dark mirror of the sea. It’s been miles since I saw any light but my own headlights, even longer since I’ve seen another car.

When the tire goes, I careen onto the shoulder and shudder to a stop. No problem, I tell myself, remain calm. I strike the flares, lay them out in a semi-circle around the car—purely ritual at this lonely hour of the night, but I’m comforted by their sizzling glow.

The jack suspends the car and I work the lugs off the tire. The spare goes on easily and I’m tightening it up when the drone of an engine separates itself from the drone of the sea. As the headlights crest the hill, I have to shield my eyes.

The car slows. It pulls up behind me, also on the shoulder, and the shape of a man emerges from the passenger side. “Need a hand, Miss?”

In the dark, he is indistinguishable from the rest of the night.

“That’s all right, thanks.” My voice boils out of me, too loud. “I’m almost finished here.”

Isolated as we are, he seems too close. He takes a step towards me. “Really,” he says, “it’s no trouble.”

I will the flares to make a barrier between us. “Really, I’m fine.”

“I don’t think you are,” he says.

That’s when I notice the driver’s side door of his car is standing open. That’s when the second man comes up behind me and strikes me down.

I come to tied to a bed beside a dead woman. Her throat is a red aperture, but her eyes are open and staring at me. Our wrists are lashed to the headboard, our ankles to the foot of the bed. Her blood swamps the mattress, still warm.

My body convulses upward, arching away from the wet bedclothes. A scream gutters in my throat, but I won’t let it out. No problem, I tell myself, remain calm. 

I force myself to look around the room, breathing deep and slow even though I can taste the drowning copper of her blood. There is a lamp on a nightstand beside the bed, chintz wallpaper, a mirror on the opposite wall that reflects our image back to us. My companion is not looking in the mirror, her eyes still fixed on me. To my left, a door; to my right, a window.

If I hold my breath, I can hear the sea. Downstairs, a radio plays sentimental songs. I can hear someone moving around, voices fluctuating softly.

“You don’t have long,” the corpse tells me. Her lips don’t move, because she’s dead.

“How do you figure?”

“I can see through the floorboards,” she says. “Also, I’m floating above you. I don’t know if you noticed.”

I hadn’t. There she is, scudding along the ceiling like a lost cloud. I wonder what it’s like to look down and see your body below you. I might soon get to find out. 

“You’d better hurry,” she says.

While I struggle to free my hands, my companion reports what’s happening downstairs.

Through the floorboards, she observes our assailants dancing a waltz. They seem very much in love, she says. Sometimes even killers need a little human touch. They’re probably very sympathetic, for murderers. One of them, the one who spoke to me, the one who is not a man but a dark shape, is drinking slugs of isopropyl alcohol. It won’t kill him, because he’s impervious to harm. If anything, it makes his stomach flutter, like nervous excitement—butterflies.

As she’s telling me all this, I slip free of the ropes. Not because I get the knots loose or anything. What happens is my hands change size. Then I can sit up and undo the ropes around my ankles. “This doesn’t normally happen,” I tell the corpse.

“You look familiar,” she says. “Do you play checkers?”

I try the window, but the frame is nailed shut. 

“No? What about chess?”

Even if I broke the glass, which would certainly attract attention, we’re two stories up and the ground below is bare rock. Beyond the stony hill is a soft dark beach and, beyond that, the sea.

“I thought maybe I knew you from one of my clubs.”

“I don’t suppose there’s a back stairway,” I ask the corpse.

“Just the one,” she says. 

It was worth a try. No problem, remain calm.

I tread carefully across the bare floor. The door is not locked, but it comes away from the frame with a groan. I hold my breath.

Downstairs, they’re still dancing. Their heads lean close. The dark one’s hand dips lower along his companion’s back.

Just a little more and I can slip out, my blood-wet dress catching on the tongue of the lock. Edging down the hall, I approach the stairs. In my stocking feet, I am quiet, but I crouch down to make myself quieter and smaller still. If I could, I would shrink down entirely, the way my hands changed size, but that portion of the evening seems to be at an end.

On the balls of my feet, my fingertips brushing the floor like an ape’s, I creep around to the top of the steps and look down—straight into the living room, where the killers are swaying in one another’s arms to a standard of days gone by. The music is louder here, and more sentimental, too. One of the men, the one who knocked me down, appears quite moved. Big, fat tears seep out of his closed eyes.

There’s no chance I can get past them. The stairs let out onto the front corridor, in plain view of the living room. The only reason I haven’t been discovered is that the killer facing in my direction has his eyes closed.

Scuttling back against the wall, out of sight from the first floor, I close my eyes and breathe carefully in and out. No problem, remain calm. 

There must be another way out. That ghost means well, but just because she can see through walls doesn’t mean she knows everything. 

As I crawl along the floorboards, splinters wedge themselves into my knees. I’m leaving a trail of borrowed blood behind me.

Back in my room, I stand up. There must be something in here that could help me escape. The corpse watches me search the room with reproachful eyes, while her spirit follows me around, bumping against the ceiling like a balloon. 

“I know I’ve seen you before,” she says. “Was it on the number nine bus?”

The bureau drawers are empty, except for a case of tarnished war medals. Maybe the killers were brothers in arms. Or maybe the medals belonged to someone they killed. Maybe they came with the house. 

“Or, no, wait,” the ghost says. “I know how I know you! We went to elementary school together, remember? We played hide and seek in your attic and you kissed me through a length of gauze?”

I could fashion the sheets into a rope, but I’d have to get them out from under the corpse, and the killers would probably spot me out the ground floor window. And I’d still have to break the window to get out.

“Or was it—You were the woman I saw on the street corner, looking up at a flock of birds in flight. Yes, that must be it. I remember the shape of your jaw.”

Then again, maybe breaking the window wouldn’t be such a bad idea. With what? Not the war medals, surely—but the lamp has promise.

“You don’t really think that’s going to work, do you?” the ghost asks.

I ignore her. I’m only going to listen to constructive criticism from now on.

The lamp lets me unplug it from the wall, and I carry it over to the window. I cradle it. “OK,” I whisper, my lips brushing its glass base, “we’ve got one shot at this. Don’t let me down.” Remain calm, remain calm.

The lamp smashes through the window with wonderful force, arcing through the night to shatter on the rocks below. I am so proud of it, but only for a moment, because then I am listening to shouts of alarm from downstairs.

I hear the killers run outside to see what the commotion is. I can hear them blundering around in the dark, yelling at one another. Down the stairs I go, my stocking feet slipping, skidding in the hall, and then I am spilling out the front door, down the walkway, running, running into the night. The dark is absolute, and somewhere behind me I can hear the killers shouting, pursuing me, but I will run. I will keep running.

Soon it will be light.

“Wait,” the ghost calls out, hovering in the doorway. “Where are you going? We were getting to be such good friends!”

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Carlea Holl-Jensen’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in, among others, Grimoire, Psychopomp, and Fairy Tale Review, where I was recently runner-up in their 2018 Prose Award, judged by Kathryn Davis. I'm the co-editor of The Golden Key, an online journal of speculative writing, and co-host of the podcast Feminist Folklore.

Blood Moon Limpia by Monique Quintana

BY MONIQUE QUINTANA

When I was a girl, I watched my boy cousins conjure spirits in our family house. Our great grandmother, Marcrina had to do a limpia to clean it out. I wonder if those spirits birthed other spirits that have existed in the many rooms that my body and my family have encountered.

Our landlady had received the Delno house as an inheritance from her dead brother. The house was trimmed with orange paint and the front yard was covered in flaxen colored weeds that itched my ankles when I walked across the lawn. They made me question why we had moved in there. It made me think, should sisters reject gifts from their dead brothers? When we lived in that house, it was the first time I had my own little fruit tree. I thought that only good would come from that tree, the way that the dark lord’s daughter, Xquic became pregnant when a tree spat on her in the old creation of her magic twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque.

The first night in the house, I walked into the bedroom doorway and my arm began to bleed. There was a tiny hook sticking out like a half moon. It must have held a bolt and lock in its past life. The sting of the pain felt different than an injection needle, and I shivered because I imagined my arms filling with rust and small bits of paint.

 On the second day, I saw that the blue on the restroom walls was painted haphazardly. I did like the color of it because it remained me of the ocean, and I very rarely get to see the ocean. I hung a mirror in the corner and it looked like an egg floating over my head. 

 On the third day of living in the Delno House, I saw her in the old storage shed shaped like a triangle. A black widow spider, its stomach the size of a marble. A red blushed stomach. All her legs quick and nervous like my fingers. I left all of my summer dresses to hang over cardboard boxes, flapping in the cold wind that swept through the broken window.  Left lipstick and thread in jars and muffin tins. Electrical cords ran under the basin, dripping with water and rust.   

My son and I burned sage under the light of the moon and my son started crying. We began to argue mightily whether the sage was bringing bad energy instead of clearing it away. If the copal we burned in the morning time was making us hate each other. In that cold wind, we made our ancestors into demons and we shivered in shame.

I invited my friends over for new moon tea and we write our intentions on small scraps of paper. The candle lights melt the bits of crystalized sugar off the pan dulce in blues and yellows and milky whites like smiles. We three took a picture in front of a large growth, combustion of purple flowers. We were happy to be consumed by the flowers.

I took baths two times a day, leaving the window open to listen to the birds. The window over the tub like a mouth. I would stand up in the tub and watch the shade grow under the giant tree. I thought of myself sleeping deep under the dirt and tree roots, my limbs tangled and peaceful. I go under water and come up again. The mirror floating about my head like an egg. My blue hair under me like kelp and like smoke.

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Monique Quintana was born and raised in the Central Valley, “the other California” and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CSU Fresno. She is a Senior Associate Editor at Luna Luna Magazine, Fiction Editor at Five-2-One Magazine, and a contributor at CLASH Media. She blogs about Latinx Literature at her site, bloodmoonblog.com, and her work has appeared in Winter Tangerine, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Grimoire, Huizache: The Magazine for Latino Literature, and The Acentos Review, among other publications. She is an alumna of the Sundress Academy for the Arts and has been nominated for Best of the Net.Her novella, Cenote City is forthcoming from Clash Books in March, 2019. You can find her at moniquequintana.com

A Spell for the Final Girl

BY MELISSA PLECKHAM

I have been thinking a lot about the final girl this year. It began over the summer, when I finally sat down to read Carol Clover’s Men, Women and Chain Saws, a text that I found to be, frankly, a bit of a slog - and also at times too confined, too reductive when it comes to the appeal of the horror genre. As a lifelong horror fan, I bristle at this idea that horror is primarily the domain of adolescent boys, subscribing instead to something akin to Bela Lugosi’s famous quote: “It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it. Are nourished by it. Shudder and cling and cry out - and come back for more.” After all, as Alice Cooper (and, later, Tori Amos) so aptly proclaimed, only women bleed, right?

Then I discovered I Am Not Your Final Girl, a collection of poems by Claire C. Holland inspired by the “last women standing” in horror movies. I love these poems so much; they’re beautiful, poignant, eerie, dangerous, visceral, and transcendent, just like the characters they give voice to. In her Introduction, Holland lays out the reasons why she wrote this particular collection at this particular time, and unsurprisingly, it has a lot to do with our current political climate.

Since 2016, we have all become final girls, on a national - on a global - scale. What a time to be alive: We are so connected, so informed, so savvy. Every bit of human intelligence, all our art, all communication: At our fingertips, constantly. My privilege allowed me to naively believe that we were beyond all this hatred, all this ignorance. That perhaps we were simply too smart for all this. That we were too wise, in short, to be oppressed.

I have learned that no one is too wise. That oppression and violence, like the boogeyman, will come for us again and again, no matter how many times we think we’ve killed it. Shoot it, stab it, send it out a second-story window.

“You can’t kill the boogeyman.”

John Carpenter’s original 1978 Halloween is my favorite film of all time, and after so many lackluster sequels I was deeply skeptical of this new incarnation, directed by David Gordon Green and recently released. What could it possibly have to offer, I wondered, after we’ve seen Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode as everything from a near-catatonic hobbling through a hospital to a wine-swilling survivor trying to medicate her PTSD? She’s been on the business end of a blade more times than I care to count, and although she always fights back, it never sticks. It always ends in terror.

But then I finally saw 2018’s Halloween. This wasn’t a Laurie who was scared for her life, on the run, hiding out. This was a Laurie who was ready to do battle. End this monster. Take the power for herself.

So to honor Laurie Strode —to honor all final girls— here is a spell for this Halloween season.

A Spell for the Final Girl: Releasing Trauma and Reclaiming Power

You’ll need:

• An image of your favorite Final Girl, or any woman who inspires you with her bravery and survival

• A white jar candle

• ModPodge or other strong glue

• Piece of paper & pen

• Dish with water

• Incense - I like sandalwood, but it should be a scent that is meaningful and beautiful to you

Before you begin the spell, affix your Final Girl to the glass of your jar candle using the glue. Add decorations if you wish - you can put as much or as little effort into this as you’d like. This will be functioning as your meditation candle.

When the candle is ready, light the wick and meditate on the Final Girl you’ve chosen. What qualities does she possess that helped her to survive? Do you see those qualities in yourself? Allow your mind to clear and wait for the answers to find you.

Next, ask yourself what you would like to overcome. Nothing is too small or too great, from a recent breakup to a professional rejection to deep-rooted childhood traumas to the patriarchy itself. When you have it in mind, write it down on the piece of paper. Again, you can write as much or as little as you’d like. It could be one word or an entire essay. Just express what you need to express.

Then, fold your piece of paper into quarters (you don’t want the piece to be too large, since you’re going to light it) and say the following words:

I call upon the final girls
I call upon the flames
To give me strength and take from me This pain which I have named.

Light a corner of the paper on fire and allow it to smolder before extinguishing it in the dish of water. Then, light the incense and envision the smoke removing any remaining negativity while you repeat:

Sisters, we are strong.
We will survive.
We are the last ones standing.

Allow the incense to burn until it goes out on its own. Dispose of the remnants of the paper in whatever way feels most empowering to you: Bury it in the soil, tear it up, throw it out. It is not yours. It never was. You are more than that. Bigger. You have survived the blade and come out stronger and wiser on the other side.

For this Halloween and beyond, my dearest hope is this: Every woman a witch. Every girl a final girl. Until, finally, we no longer have to outrun, outwit, outlast, outmaneuver.

Until we are free.

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Melissa Pleckham is a writer and performer living in Los Angeles with her husband and their tuxedo cat. Her short films and screenplays have been selected for festivals including Salem Horror Fest, Screamfest, and Midsummer Scream, while her writing has been featured on Death & the Maiden and HelloHorror, as well as in the collection Entombed in Verse from FunDead Publications. Her thoughts on Halloween and horror films can be found on her blog, Spooky Little Girl, and she is on Instagram and Twitter @mpleckham.

Inner Witch: An Interview With Gabriela Herstik

INTERVIEW BY LISA MARIE BASILE

I simply cannot fucking say enough good things about Gabriela Herstik. She’s kind, compassionate, supportive AF, magical, knowledgeable and inclusive. I first “met” her on Instagram, and could sense her wild magical passion through the ether. I now consider her a friend. Her book, CRAFT (the UK version) and INNER WITCH (the US edition) is gorgeous—and it’s even translated into Spanish and on sale in Spain.

She does such a service to the witches among us, and sets such a great example of someone approaching witchcraft ethically and creatively. I’m honored to have sat down and chatted with her here:

LMB: First up: can you tell us a little more about how you discovered your inner magic? What did that process look like—especially because I know you come from a traditionally religious family, and when did you decide you were a witch?

Inner Witch: A Modern Guide to the Ancient Craft

By Gabriela Herstik

Buy on Amazon

Gabriela Herstik: I’ve always been deeply spiritual. I grew up with a Mom who has been into different esoteric practices ( crystals, meditation, yoga, energy) since the 80s. Both my parents are Jewish, and my dad’s a reform rabbi, so I grew up in the framework of that faith. I should also mention I grew up in Johns Creek Georgia- aka the Bible Belt. I discovered witchcraft after getting a deck of oracle cards when I was 11. This led me to another book about witchcraft and suddenly I remembered going to Salem, MA on Halloween three years prior and learning about witchcraft at the museum, seeing a ritual..etc. I knew that I was a witch but still had to go through my bat mitzvah even though I knew I was pagan.

I was so young so my practice has evolved a lot. It got more serious when I left for college and started combining my love of fashion and tarot into a series of blog posts for my then - fashion blog that were looks based off the wild unknown tarot cards. Around this time, I started studying yoga more seriously and taking my practice more seriously. Now I celebrate pretty much every full and new moon, and holiday.

LMB: You write a lot about witchcraft—were you always a writer, or did you become one to express your love of witchcraft? Did they sort of bloom hand in hand?

Gabriela Herstik: I have been writing much longer than I’ve been a witch. I wanted to be a writer in second grade, and I remember loving my schools essay contests. I’m super air sign and always have a million things going on in my head, so writing has always been a form of escapism to me. It helps me get things out and transmute all the junk in my head to something else. My grandma was a writer too, she wrote poetry and a memoir- I didn’t find that out until after she passed away when I was 18.

LMB: When you got the book deal for CRAFT, how did you want to approach the book? Was it important for you to differentiate it in some ways from other books? For one, it’s got a personal streak, and it’s inclusive, and it’s got a focus on fashion, too, which is fresh and exciting.

Gabriela Herstik: Thank you so much! From my own experience as a witch who grew up in the Deep South without much of a community, who really learned from Books, I knew the things that I wanted to include; things I wish I knew! Also, thanks to my column for Nylon, I have a steady stream of people asking me questions about the craft. I knew I wanted to talk about fashion magick (and share my story with it) both because it’s so important in my own practice and because it’s something I don’t see others addressing in the same way. I knew that my publisher and I agreed that I should include tarot, astrology and crystals. Everything else kind of stemmed from my own practice and what I felt was a well rounded approach to what this practice can look like.

LMB: When people think of the Witch, what are they getting wrong today? And what are they getting right?

Gabriela Herstik: I think that people think of witchcraft as a monolith, that it’s all skinny white women waving around sage wands. Witchcraft is rooted in folk magick, found across the world in so many different ways. It’s rooted in indigenous practices, it’s led by POC and other marginalized folks. We’re not all satanic (which has its own misconceptions) and we don’t all subscribe to the notion of being a “white witch” or “black witch”.

I think we’re starting to see a shift in the idea of the witch as someone who is unapologetic in their power, as someone who utilizes magick, as an empowered wo/men who lives consciously and in their fullest incarnation

LMB: I think we both get asked a lot about the intersection of social media and magical living or witchcraft. There’s talk of empty Instagram posts that are “purely” or “only” aesthetic, or revealing sacred altars (which remove the “power). Stuff like that. What do you think about that sort of talk?

Image by Alexandra Herstik

Gabriela Herstik: I think that to dismiss social media as frivolous or as all bad is really hurtful! Obviously I think, like for anything, boundaries are important. Obviously putting your worth in social media is harmful. But I think that used consciously and with intention, social media can be a way to connect, to learn, to find community. Years ago, I would post photos of my altar and talk about the spells and rituals I was performing. Now I don’t do that. I don’t share photos of my personal working altars, and I don’t share what specific things I’m doing or post photos of that work. I think the things I’m working on and seeds I’m watering are too sacred to share. This is an evolution though, and I think that it’s important for each witch to ask why she’s sharing what she is. Sometimes I post photos of spells as part of the magick- having likes and other peoples interactions infusing energy into the spell. But even then, I won’t share abojt what I’m doing or why. Like anything- this has to be a relationship you cultivate for yourself!

LMB: Let’s talk Dark Venus. That’s your alter ego of sorts—which has her own Instagram account. What prompted you to create that space? What sort of things draws you to the dark? Here at Luna Luna, and in all of my own work, the darkness is a friend, an ally, an inspiration—and I’m driven to it because I don’t believe it’s a synonym for “bad.” How do you approach it? Why Venus?

Gabriela Herstik: So I’d been working with Venus for about a year and some change when this archetype of Dark Venus came to me. I had just begun my exploration with kink and she was like this shining light to me- like if Venus was a dom, If pleasure for her was trasnsmuted through pain. Venus is my matron, so I started working with this archetype by incorporating bdsm into my rituals and I created a shrine for her as well. @Dark___Venus is my “thot account” where I can explore my shadows outside of the public eye. I post about cannabis, sexuality, and just use it as a personal expiration of darkness and self. I am a very positive person but I have hella Scorpio placement (including my moon and north node) so exploding my shadows has always been important to me. My first muse was the death card. So Dark Venus isn’t only a deity I work with, but another aspect of my Self that I get to explore through sexuality and kink and art and instagram! I’m an exhibitionist and think of social media as its own kind of performance art. It’s been really fun and I’ve loved connecting to venus in this way.

LMB: Also, you run FASHION IS DYING, which I adore. Can you talk about your interest and roots in fashion and it’s intersection with magic for you?

Image by Alexandra Herstik

Gabriela Herstik: So my background is in fashion writing, which I studied in college. I started a fashion blog ( Breathing Fashion) at 14, and was convinced I would be a fashion editor up until I wrote Craft/ Inner Witch. Five years ago I started a series of outfits based on tarot cards for my blog, and wrote about that. That was when I first started exploring the intersection of spirituality and style. My first pitch and freelance piece was for The Numinous on how the death card inspired my style. Then I started writing for nylon, my first piece for them was how to make your wardrobe actually witchier. Both sides of my family were in the garment industry so it feels really special to connect my spiritual and physical identity in this way. Fashion is Dying is my latest incarnation of this. I do zodiac season style guides and interview really cool voices in the industry and do full and new moon reports and it’s just been really fun. I love the intersection of glamour and identity.

LMB: You live in LA but you have visited NYC recently. Is there a different sort of magic in these cities? A different kind of witch?

Gabriela Herstik: Yes absolutely!! I think NYC is way more witchy and magical in the sense that there’s a huge community and pull on that there. In LA it’s more self-care / wellness, and less magick/ witchcraft. So I think LA is more of like… a wild witch who does shrooms on the beach and has crazy rituals in Malibu and NYC is more of an organized coven or solitary practitioner more rooted in the occult.

LMB: What do you think is the most radical and important thing a person can do to honor and care for themselves today?

Gabriela Herstik: I think it’s to be self-compassionate and to allow themselves to be wherever they’re meant to be. And to choose love. To love deeply and wholly and fully. To make the effort and set the intention to know themselves and honor themselves. To be okay with not being okay and to ask for help when they need it.

Image by Alexandra Herstik

LMB: What are some of your favorite books and resources for beginners and seasoned practitioners?

Gabriela Herstik: “Light Magic for Dark Times”, “Witches, Sluts, Feminists,” The Witch Wave Podcast, The Hoodwitch, “Crystal Healing and Sacred Pleasure” my book “Inner Witch,” the local occult section of the library or bookstore, the internet, The School of Witchery online, HOI TV (house of intuitions platform) !!

LMB: Aw, thank you! Can you tell us one secret about the writing process for your book? (I love, as a writer, knowing these little tidbits).

Gabriela Herstik: EXCELL SPREADSHEETS! Figuring out how many chapters I needed to write a month, breaking that down to what each chapter needed to include, and then literally having a spreadsheet of what I needed to write each day to meet my goal. It sounds like a lot but it’s what helped me schedule and have a social life! Like I could go to brunch but knew I had to write the rest of the day and knew what I needed to get done.

LMB: Where is your book available, and what are your figure plans? Do you have any events coming up?

Gabriela Herstik: It’s available everywhere in the US, UK and Spain! I’m doing an event with Laser Kitten on Halloween, and have an event on November 17th in honor of the dark goddess, which I’ll be releasing details for soon. I just had a bunch of events in NYC so I have to plan more for this upcoming season!

A Hex, and Other Poems by Sophie Allen

BY SOPHIE ALLEN

a hex

the spell, to be read 

under a waxing crescent moon:

burn, burn— 

& it starts with a cauldron— no, fuck 

a cauldron— you’ll want a pint of ben & jerry’s

(i like phish food)

& to light a candle: look for one left over

from xmas, probably called something cute

like sparkling cinnamon snow

or seasonal depressive disorder

or spiced white cocoa

remember specifically to use 

a scented one so the burnt-plastic

smell of your melting polaroids

(from the yellow camera he bought you)

is masked by a pleasant winter wick.

it has stormed

—after the witches

for hours, and i am reminded of shakespeare,

of witches’ brews, of something wicked 

this way comes. closer than before, 

onyxing over blue the air smells of rain. 

gull-pocked clouds swirl over my head,

ozoned and heavy.  i shiver. 

soaked to the bone, i sting my soles on puddles

and pavement. thunder cracks and the sky streaks

white. it opens up again, fresh raindrops 

come like shadow, so depart, dissolving into heat

and salt air. they burn my lip, split between teeth,

trickle bloody business down my chin. 

i am going to be fine. 

mad honey

the mothman visited me

& we talked beside the rhododendrons, or 

more specifically, we discussed 

the way the moonlight fluttered

through his paper wings & i saw

the veins, a flowchart, the way 

rhododendrons can be hybridized—

caroline, a pink flower named for a daughter. 

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Sophie Allen is a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She once worked in a haunted convenience store. Find her on Twitter: @sallentxt.

Please note that the italics in "it has stormed" are from Macbeth. 

How to Cast a Spell & Other Poems by Sabrina Rose Nelson

BY SABRINA ROSE NELSON

How to Cast a Spell

Winter midnight, trickle of

muted moonlight, more like

shadow, still in skinned-knee reverence,

here is how you cast a spell:

Cauldron open face up on the desk

flecked with musk and mugwort.

Stir in sea water, honeycomb,

gold striated stones. Invoke:

Air to drink into parched lungs,

Earth to root wet soil deep,

Fire to burn noise, wreckage, and

Water to guide soft slippery excavation.

Take three deep breaths:

Consecrate this page to heal and to shed,

may the spell I now weave

honor all that has been bled

By water and salt rock, by smoke and scent,

by heart and outpour, conjure up

ocean wild, wind blown, eyes wide

unafraid mystery, born deep in the belly

of an active volcano:

It lives.

It breathes.

For as it will,

so mote it be.

Grandmother

Muck root woman.

Garden woman.

Vivid green, pulsating life woman.

Always feed the ducks kind of woman.

Waxing moon woman. 

Vanilla and moss scented woman.

Sweet earthy scent that brings me home woman.

Feet on the grass woman.

Kitchen witch woman.

Late summer night woman.

Sunflower woman.

Blackbird woman.

Ocean wild, eyes wide, wind blown woman.

Chin first, matted fir, tree sap woman. 

Fire belly woman.

Appetite woman.

Heart shake woman.

Earthquake woman.

Know it in your bones woman.

Raw skin woman.

Moon heavy woman.

Too soft, woman.

Too much, woman.

Buried grief woman. 

Blood worn woman.

Marrow sucked woman.

Goodbye woman.

My woman.

Healing

Inanna, Isis, Lilith, source,

root planted earth deep,

I offer up Magdalene red,

deep ruby oozing down

to the once razed earth below me.

She swells-

moonlit lush singing sweet rebirth,

full and unashamed in her potency.

In her winter: violent desecration,

soil burns devastation.

Violet blossoms sacked,

garnets turned to blades.

The antidote: bleed medicine to core,

lung deep, seep down and root.

Enveloped in the sweet, musky

earth cauldron, I see:

eyes a flooding river,

root to earth,

heart laid bare in her warm night.

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Sabrina Rose Nelson is a poet, kitchen witch, and recent sociology graduate whose work now revolves around writing and holistic wellness. Her work has appeared in Bitch Magazine and the anthology I AM STRENGTH, among other places. Her writing is deeply influenced by the women in her family. To her, writing is a way to alchemize grief and shame into beauty, connection, and healing. Originally from the rainy and magical Pacific Northwest, she now lives in cozy New England with her partner. Find her on Instagram at @xosabrinarose.

Old Grandma: A Ghost Story

BY SARAH FADER

When my son, Ari, was three years old, he started seeing things. Now, they weren’t hallucinations, but he is a spiritual child and is highly intuitive. One day, in our brownstone in Brooklyn, Ari was trying to sleep. He had trouble getting himself to bed and seemed preoccupied. He was looking in front of himself as if there was someone or something standing there. I asked what he was looking at and he said “old grandma is here!” I said “do you mean grandma?” and he replied “no, old grandma! She’s wearing black and white and she visits me sometimes.” I immediately knew that he was looking at a ghost. I wasn’t creeped out, because I believe in spirits and I believe in ghosts. I’ve never seen anything myself, but I know that my child is very connected.

I’m an intuitive individual. I do read tarot and believe in things that are “new age-y,” so I wasn’t surprised that my child inherited that quality. In addition to Ari seeing this “old grandma” person, I noticed some strange things about my house. One of the things that happened during that time period is that when our house became messy, objects would fall on the ground randomly, and would often shatter on the floor. For example, there was one instance where there was a pile of papers on the table in the kitchen and a mug was on top of them. The mug wasn’t in a precarious position, but I saw it fall on the floor and break. I knew that this was the result of a spirit, and I connected it to the woman that Ari was seeing. I had my friends mother come over and see if she detected any ghosts because she is Brazilian and comes from a background that prompted her to believe in ghosts as well. I find that cultures outside of the United States are more open to these things.

I decided to ask her if she’d check it out. There were two doors that lead to my office. During the evening, the doors would abruptly slam shut. Sometimes, they’d do this during the day, but it was mostly at night. I asked my friend's mom if she’d take a look in the office. As soon as she approached the office, the doors slammed in her face and almost hit her nose, I knew that something was up. The doors weren’t closing because there was wind blowing or anything like that. They were randomly shutting and I was extremely confused. My friend's mom said that this “old grandma” person was a Victorian lady, she suspected. Rather, I told her that I thought it was a Victorian woman because that’s what I picked up on using my own intuition. Plus, I knew that the brownstone was old. My friend's mom talked to this “old grandma” person and found that she was there because she wanted to protect my kids.

Upon discovering this piece of information, I was not afraid of her. I still found it annoying that she’d knock things over and break them. Another thing is that she didn’t want to leave our house. Old grandma was upset when the house was messy and would break things frequently to express this to us. I asked my friend's mom what to do to fix this situation, and she said that the old woman was stubborn. “Old grandma” wouldn’t leave.. She wanted to look after the kids, and for me to keep the house clean. I’m disorganized and messy; I have ADHD, so this is understandable. My ex-husband was the cleaner of the relationship, so he took care of that more often than I did.

Old grandma visited Ari for years. I used to ask him about old grandma periodically because I wanted him to remember her. Now, he’s ten years old. I asked him about her the other day to see if he recalled anything. He doesn’t remember the story at all, which is interesting. We’ve since left Brooklyn, but I believe that “old grandma” is still there, hanging out on the third floor of my old home on Bergen street. If you’re reading this, old grandma, hello! Thank you for influencing us to keep our house tidy. The lesson that I want readers to take away from this is that if you’re living with a ghost, you don’t need to be afraid. They may not be harmful. They might actually be there to help you (or, in my case, remind you to clean.)

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Sarah Fader is the CEO and Founder of Eliezer Tristan Publishing Company, where she is dedicated to sharing the words of authors who endure and survive trauma and mental illness. She is also the CEO and Founder of Stigma Fighters, a non-profit organization that encourages individuals with mental illness to share their personal stories. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Quartz, Psychology Today, The HuffingtonPost, HuffPost Live, and Good Day New York. Sarah is a native New Yorker who enjoys naps, talking to strangers, and caring for her two small humans and two average-sized cats. Like six million other Americans, Sarah lives with Bipolar type II, OCD ADHD, and PTSD. Through Stigma Fighters, Sarah hopes to change the world, one mental health stigma at a time.

The Spolia Tarot Deck: A Review

BY SELENA CHAMBERS

[To get a little more behind the scenes of Spolia, stay tuned to my interview with creators Jessa Crispin and Jen May here.]

Jessa Crispin and Jen May’s Spolia Tarot Deck is a collaboration that, after three years in the making, was Kickstarted and quickly funded last December. A modern riff on Tarot’s history, it remixes the Raider-Waite-Smith system with that of the Italian Minchiate and Sola Busca decks, allowing readers to explore 94 fully illustrated (including elemental and zodiac) cards. “Spolia” means building with rubble, a concept that resonants throughout the deck. It also encapsulates perfectly what has become Tarot’s sole purpose:  it’s not cartomancy, it’s therapy. Tarot gives you the tools to distract a busy, downward spiraling mind with narrative (and because it’s all about you, your ego shuts up for once to tune in) and guide it through the psychic wreckage towards clean-up and reconstruction. An uneasy task right now with the constant demands to never have dead air on our social media, further compounded by the constant dumpster fire headlines and the IV stream of fear and anxiety they feed. 

This is something Jessa Crispin certainly understands, who in addition to Creative Tarot, is the author of such cultural criticism as The Dead Ladies Project and Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. I’ve been a huge fan of her work for many reasons, but perhaps most significant here is its interest in asking more questions than providing answers about difficult issues, because in many cases answers aren’t as absolute as we’d like them to be. Her work urges readers to come to their own conclusions rather than just lap up whatever ad hoc interpretation the expert of the day wants to serve you. Which is perhaps why her Creative Tarot became my gateway to considering card reading as a serious pursuit. Not only did it present me with a system divorced from what had been to me a superstitious context, but it honed in—like much of her writing does—on the only religion for which I have ever felt true devotion—Art.

Creative Tarot is a celebration and demythologization of the creative life, and the Spolia deck is a broader, integrated extension of that.While Spolia isn’t new-agey, witchy, or remotely woo-woo, it is Hermetic. Based on six years of research, the deck encompasses numerology, astrology, alchemy, world mythology, art and literary history, as well as the symbolic language of flora, fauna, and minerals. It is very much about reclaiming intellectual spiritualism, when art and science worked together to find the seat of the soul. By using esoteric systems like alchemy—whose seeming sorcery stemmed from the integrating creative explorations with those of the natural world— Spolia provides a creative pathway that doesn’t just lead to art making, but to the reinvention of our more authentic selves.

All of the above could be a lot to package within one image, but the negative space of Jen May’s sparse and vibrant compositions do as much heavy lifting as the figures acting out their meaning. A lot of this has to do with color— Emerald Green as Earth, Royal Blue as Water, Black as Air, and Cardinal Red as Fire—which allows for more cross-referencing among the trumps and pips beyond the usual numerology and elemental associations. Of course, color theory and tarot have always been something of an alchemical marriage, but the way it is integrated here in Spolia reminds me more of the bold, experimental studies of Ithell Colquhoun’s Taro as Color than of Patrica Colman Smith’s pastel colorblocks.

The Aces establish these Fauvist codes, and the spectrum immediately unfolds throughout each suit starting with the 2s. In 2 of Coins, the green is concentrated on the neverending goal of juggling Saturn and Jupiter, while the expanding blue ocean in the background indicates a need to control emotions. Pink is used in the 2 of Cups to mix the fire of passion and decadence into a emotional relationship, bringing abundance and balance. 2 of Swords uses a bit of blue to indicate the presence of intuition in an otherwise bleak space of logic and reason in which decisions need to be made.

Readers familiar with RWS will not have trouble grounding themselves within Spolia; however, there are some significant diversions that might actually give you a better understanding of the Major Arcana’s universalities. For example, in the RWS deck, there are a few cards that are visually connected—The Lovers and The Devil; The Wheel of Fortune and The World—that are severed in the Spolia deck. I found this especially significant as these connections never really jived with me, especially with the emphasis on Primordial Sin in the Lovers and the Devil. In Spolia, the Lovers card celebrates absolute pleasure while the Devil focuses on compulsive consumption. With the Lovers divorced from Primordial knowledge, and as such divorced from the Devil, I was able to understand these cards more. The Devil especially drove home a whole new meaning for me with its allusions to Saturn Devouring His Son that came to involve mentor or familial relationships in a much more nuanced way than the bondage metaphor found in RWS.

And while I feel these cards break with the Primordial Sin parallels, they still are tied with a sensorial symmetry through overwhelming feelings. In The Lovers, it is a positive overwhelming sense of infatuation and pleasure which can be as much within the mind as within the heart. But if you loose your grounding, that same emotion, if not channeled right, could become a whirlwind of anxiety and misery.

Some other great tweaks: The Hierophant combines the Babylonian pageantry to what has been a solely Catholic representation of spiritual ambition. In mixing ancient and active religion with elemental harmony, it shows how difficult, worthy, and ephemeral the goal of spiritual perfection is. The Temperance card has reinstated the Hermaphrodite into their rightful reign within that card to illustrate the integration of opposites to make something new. The Star has added poignancy through the casting of Marchesa Luisa Casati, which transforms the introspective/coming home interpretation into standing in the world as exactly who you are. My favorite change has to be with The Moon, where the barking dogs and crawling crustaceans are shoved aside for the triple-faced goddess Hekate to rule the pathways, emphasizing the key’s importance of needed shadow work for fulfillment, integration, and transformation.

The pips may be too numerous to go into in great depth, but I especially appreciate the natural symbiosis of creation with the other necessities and phases of life, and the brutal honesty these cards alongside Jessa’s personal white book interpretations present. I have often found within Tarot too much polite advice, and sometimes I need cards to look like how the situation really should feel. Like when I feel a phase of my life has sucked me dry and I want to run away, I don’t want to be comforted by a nice family all packed up to go on a neat trip in the Six of Swords. I need to be confronted with a melancholy woman out to sea, alone with only her choices. I need to be able to identify with the iconography as much as possible, and just as the absence of a man steering a ship for a mother and her child has done wonders for how I read the Six of Swords, so does the absence of any children or visual implications of a nuclear family (10 of Cups) make it easier for me to relate as it is closer to my own interrelationship dynamics. In fact, many of the cards opt for more abstraction than figurative representation, and it really does drive home the deeper contexts faster. In the Six of Coins, the beggar cards and their patron are replaced by a network of hands that blur the line between giving and taking, raising the question about economic and emotional exchange.

And while all of this is very serious, the deck doesn’t get lost in its dogma thanks to the presences of pop-cultural figures alongside the historical. John Wick is connected to the Knight of Coins; Mary Todd Lincoln takes on our anxiety in the Four of Coins; and Lili’uokalani teaches us about the veracity of love as the Queen of Cups.

The extra cards were a little harder for me to get behind at first as, despite having several decks, none are Minchiate. Personally, astrology isn’t my strong suit. The Little White Book offers wonderful meanings for the cards, but no instructions on how they were envisioned to be used. I played around with integrating them into my normal spreads until I finally read about zodiac correspondences with the trumps and began treating them like court card supplements to the Major Arcana. Sometimes, but not always, then when a zodiac card would appear in a spread, it would often be next to its corresponding key. I would take that as pointing to the personality or mindset I needed to channel the card. For example, I needed to adapt a tempered Libra state of mind to get closer to Justice’s purpose. But sometimes that could get muddy, as in one spread, the extroversion of Leo seemed antithetical to the patience needed for Strength. 

The other route I began to explore with the astrological cards was using them to indicate time, with each card standing in as signifier for the month, or even for new moons and full moon readings. If you are someone much better versed in the nuances of astrology, I am sure you could have a field day with various constellation and horoscope spreads. But for now, this is how I’ve come to contend with it.

The elements have been a bit easier for me. When they come up in readings, I feel like they are pointing to what is lacking or in abundance despite the pattern of suits in the spread. I also enjoy using them as signifiers for Mind, Body, Head, and Spirit spreads.

I’ve been getting to know the Spolia Tarot Deck for around seven months now, and it has never failed to shoot straight, to take me down personal plot twists and turns, and ultimately help me navigate what is a pretty anxiety-driven psyche. I learn new things from the cards’ symbolism every spread, which encourages me to go even further into my own study For the most part, it is my go-to deck, and I am sure it will become so for everyone who invites it into their practice.

To purchase the deck with manual, check out their website HERE.

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Selena Chambers writes fiction and non-fiction from the swampy depths of North Florida. Her work has appeared in such publications as Literary Hub, Luna Luna, and Beautiful Bizarre, all with an emphasis on women creatives. She’s been nominated for several awards including a Hugo and two World Fantasy awards. Her most recent books include the weird historical fiction collection, Calls for Submission (Pelekinesis), and the anthology Mechanical Animals (Hex Publishing) co-edited with Jason Heller. Learn more at www.selenachambers.com or Twitter: @BasBleuZombie.