By: Emily Rankin
June ninth
The size of it should become obvious.
The hill, the mountain,
those big emotional scenes
making everyone seem to be some thing, some
crawling shell
Not wanting to talk about what’s really bothering you.
Not even knowing what’s really bothering you.
You, in particular.
You are prone to this.
It is likely that you will be overwhelmed
It is likely that you will make a scene
Something, some big thing, crawling the back of your mind
Something you don’t like, the size of it
upsets you, overwhelms you
You can feel it making something new and obvious in you.
To let it out, though
Not knowing how to put it back into your mind—
April thirteenth
Being certain is nearly impossible.
The moment quickly shifting in
the hidden cave of your heart
Impossible to avoid the long moments
There is no withdrawing to safety
There are no lasting decisions
Let the natural settling of time
make the signs truthful
Let it all mean some nearly impossible thing
The change is gentle
The flow of it pouring out
over the moon’s back
June twelfth
The confusing thing about reality is the way you might feel
like you are trying to escape something.
Running frantically, just steps ahead of some
culminating scene
The time running without looking back
running away and always, the distance between
So many of these so-called monsters
So often you fall and
keep falling
in the actual imaginable fear
In the movies
you will see the hero, the victim, the monsters.
You will see the similar cancers—
The hero must trip,
The monster must keep the scene
Sometimes, the confusing thing about life is
the way things become.
The way these situations keep the hero and the
victim and the monster all
always trying to escape.
Emily Rankin was born in Riverside, California and attended Abilene Christian University, where she received a BFA in 2011. Her body of work deals with the tangled threads of human connection and liminal space. She is currently based in New Mexico.
"In times of great uncertainty, I think people are drawn to anything that purports to give meaning to our suffering or confusion. I find myself thinking often of those things to which we turn when we feel lost. Horoscopes offer some comfort for some of us; they tell us that there are reasons for what happens, that our lives are guided by some larger force that exists outside ourselves.
These pieces represent an experiment—they are formed from scraps of horoscopes that have been rearranged, reconfigured, and reformatted into poetry. I’m interested in what makes a poem a poem. I’m interested in how we might elevate and reframe some common thing we see every day, like a horoscope, into art. How, if we read it in a new form, a new context, we might find something new within it."