Ariana Reines

  • slant September 07, 2018

    Days of Awe

    ONE TIME WHEN I WAS ON MUSHROOMS Richard Pryor took possession of my body and proceeded to give a lecture to me and my friends on the origins of hot peppers and the true meaning of wheat.

    He explained that how hot peppers got hot was terrible things were done to them, especially with fire—they were horrifically burned, in sick and twisted ways—which led to great strife and suffering on the part of the peppers. He continued that indeed the only way for a piece of matter to transmit heat and energy is for great heat and energy to have been transmitted into it. All of this was communicated not the

  • slant August 10, 2018

    In the Skin of a Lion

    LATE IN THE SUMMER OF 1999 I was in love with a crust punk. We met one night when he and his friend panhandled me after I couldn’t get into a nightclub. Well maybe it was more of a bar. I don’t know because I couldn’t get in. I didn’t have a fake ID. Anyway, the friend was pale and skinny, scabs up his greenish arms. He just made the guy, who said his name was Johnny, look better. Johnny was hale and tan in his boots and ripped t-shirt. He got kicked out of seventh grade, he said, for reading Isaac Asimov, and out of his girlfriend’s Boston College dorm because he wanted her to open her eyes

  • slant July 12, 2018

    All My Trials

    THE MATERNAL BODY INCLUDES THE CHILD. The maternal body includes the dilated aura inside and outside the body that admits, and nourishes, another: thus it is also the enveloping aura into which consensual lovers are welcomed. And the magic space that is ripped open when thieves enter looking for easy wealth and plunder. The cultures now ruling the planet treat it similarly.

    Textbook medical astrology will tell you Cancer rules the breasts/chest, the stomach, and the alimentary canal. Which, it seems to me, would include not only what extends from the buccal opening but also our first channel for

  • slant June 13, 2018

    Festina Lente

    MY BREASTS & THE BASE OF MY ABDOMEN & THE FLESH AROUND MY KIDNEYS are filling with particles of sorrow. This is what gets disbursed into me monthly. It is my most reliable wage. The languishing weakness that presses down on my inguinal hinge. The gently eviscerating heat and dread licking up at my root from my inner thighs. Humiliating it gently, without words or situations, drawing upon it as an insect might draw from a flower, bidding me procreate.

    Welcome to my minimum monthly allotment of suffering.

    Welcome to the technology by which I feel the world, which comes through me by nothing but the

  • slant May 15, 2018

    Diamond Cutter

    SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIVE YEARS AND SEVEN DAYS AGO, in the city of Norwich, a recluse named Julian beheld the whole of creation in the palm of her hand, in an orb the size of a hazelnut. It was here that W.G. Sebald taught for forty years, at the University of East Anglia, and where, in the opening pages of The Rings of Saturn, we find him prostrate in a hospital room—and then standing at the window there—having collapsed a year and a day after a summer’s walk across the county of Suffolk.

    I am writing you from my office at UEA, where, rereading The Rings of Saturn, I seemed to smell the rising

  • slant January 30, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 30, 2018

    Forsake thy cage, 

                 Thy rope of sands, 

    Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee 

    Good cable, to enforce and draw, 

              And be thy law, 

    While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. 

    —George Herbert, “The Collar”

    AT 11:41 AM EST, THE MOON MAKES ITS LAST ASPECT IN CANCER, an opposition to Mercury in Capricorn, to go Void-of-Course over lunchtime 'til she enters Leo at 1:53 PM. 

    This interval is a wonderful opportunity to be silent, or at the very least to slow down your speech (Mercury in Capricorn) and train your inner dialogue on your heart of hearts.

    Mercury will enter

  • slant January 29, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 29, 2018

    fer dans notre coeur (St. John Perse, in a poem I haven’t read in a decade, which I might be misquoting, which I might have invented)

    I'M THINKING ABOUT THE BLUE BLOOD that flows through the heart of the queens and kings of the jungle, the blue interiors of your body, the blue light that spreads behind your eyelids when you’ve seen too much sun. When light is suddenly thrown on you after an accustomed darkness: the blue-white of the shock. The blue haze that hovers around the Alps in real life, making them resemble old photographs of themselves: because that haze is the exact blue hue of decomposing

  • slant January 26, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 26, 2018

    IT SEEMS TO ME THAT MANY, A GREAT MANY SENSED THEIR—BUT I DON’T WANT TO USE THE WORD INCOMPLETENESS. A certain discontinuity in themselves, an opening, a sense that somehow between their skeletons and the flesh there was work to be done, a sense of something insufficiently-come-into-being—not merely the personality, but something else. I think they felt this from the very beginning.

    And I suppose the old sages filled this space with breath, which carried God, I guess, to every cell of the body—commanded God back into the flesh: a kind of mystic remarriage after the necessary divorce

  • slant January 25, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 25, 2018

    SORRY I'M LATE. I'm on a plane. Woke up to coyotes laughing like emphysemic old ladies, rattling their teacups, rattling their big costume jewelry. Orion's Belt was so frank in my dull city eye, like the silver belts studded with fake turquoise they sell at the airport under glass: sometimes it's hard to believe how much you're allowed to have for free you find yourself paying for the knockoff. Being A Parody Of Heaven, a memoir. The virility of “3.” Mercury sextile Jupiter in Scorpio today should have you feeling a little clearer and less freaked out/grossed out by some of the old yous and

  • slant January 24, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 24, 2018

    THE MOON entered Taurus at 8:41 AM EST squaring the Pluto-Mercury conjunction in Capricorn, forming a trine to Saturn in Capricorn, inconjunct Mars toward the end of his run through Scorpio. This is a day for forensics. The Moon attains First Quarter stage at 5:20 PM EST: this represents the first parry, or the first big question put to what you seeded at the New Moon. The seed of the Capricorn New Moon is turning and, to quote Huey Newton, “contradictions are the ruling principle of the universe:” ambition and executive capacity meet an audit both practical and spiritual today.

    1. To find the

  • slant January 23, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 23, 2018

    OBVIOUSLY I KEEP WANTING TO BREAK MY NDA.

    Obviously I have been wanting to do this for years. I have discussed it with editors, with journalists, I have discussed it with myself, I have taken up fiction in the dark, I have “hid my face in a crowd of stars,” I have found so many ways to hide my rage in universal currents and found ways to channel my pedagogy into the stars, about which I have only a beginner’s knowledge, because I want to give, and because I was born to give, and because I have tried to work outside of the ordinary delivery systems of power and knowledge as long as I’ve lived,

  • slant January 22, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 22, 2018

    I WATCHED TWO HAWKS overtake each other in the rising light and ordered another plate of bread and butter. Snow was crisping on the ground, flocked here and there by spikes of blackened grass, like an ancient man’s early beard. I’d promised to research accidents, because a friend of a friend was killed in one last week.

    Uranus was Saturn’s father; Saturn was the father of Jupiter. Uranus was long visible to the naked eye, but was taken for a star, not a planet, until Sir William Herschel announced, in 1781, that he’d been observing what he initially took to be a comet without a tail, but which

  • slant January 19, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 19, 2018

    THE SUN ENTERS AQUARIUS AT 4:24 EST TODAY.

    Aquarius, the water-bearer, rules the ankles and the transmission of information in waves.

    Sound currents; electrical currents; the seeming suddenness with which the spirit of the times commands new social orders.

    Inspiration, and inspiration’s consequences.

    Inspiration, and inspiration’s consequent gossamer and fiber-optic structures.

    The idea of the internet and the internet itself.

    Not so much the waters of Rome, but the imperial aqueducts and plumbing. 

    Less the exploitation of resources than the exploitation of information. The idea of information itself…

  • slant January 18, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 18, 2018

    I’M CURIOUS if you’ve ever found your soul upended by an image. By a single image.

    This is the one that did that to me:

    It was something about the awkwardness and rhythm in exact proportion—something about the Christ, in half-crucifixion position, offering his wound to the probing Jupiter finger of the Apostle Thomas—strange enough to verge on the sexual, awkward enough to wedge itself through the joinery of my skull, crack open my begging bowl, & let the light pour in.

    I’m not Christian at all, but I did watch a lot of Nick at Nite when I was little, and my friends had stuff like this

  • slant January 17, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 17, 2018

    A NEAT GASH OF SUNLIGHT is widening across the sand. We talked late around the fire all night, trading origin stories. An Egyptian god spat into his hand and had congress with himself and made two sons. When things began everything was darkness and goo. A woman took a boat to heaven and got drunk with God and carried all his powers down to Earth. The feminine principle accidentally emanated a son then hid him in clouds; he didn’t know he had parents when he created us; there was much he did not know, in spite of his capacities as a fabricator, hence the world we now know and inhabit. Adam and

  • slant January 16, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 16, 2018

    “analogies are dangerous”

    —Muriel Rukeyser

    I ASKED MY TEACHER how he came to learn astrology. Misery he answered. Misery is a good school I said. The best, he answered. Laughter. 

    I asked him how he’d made my chart eight years ago, whether he worked with an ephemeris in some form. He doesn’t have Internet now and he certainly didn’t have it then. I asked the planets where they were when you were born, he said. I rather believed him, while disbelieving, or I believed him with a sense of humor, the only way one can believe anything, perhaps the only way one should believe anything, including

  • slant January 15, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 15, 2018

    THE NEW MOON occurs tomorrow, January 16, 2018, at 9:17 PM EST, at twenty-six degrees & fifty-five minutes of Capricorn.

    As the Sun’s tenancy in Capricorn nears its end (he enters Aquarius on January 19—preceded by Venus, who moves into Aquarius on January 17, and Mercury sails thataway at the end of the month) this New Moon lovingly invites us, once again, to initiate the structure, discipline, sobriety, & integrity heralded by Saturn’s return home to Capricorn late last year, & by the mystic marriage of masculine and feminine pulsed into us by the Cancer Full Moon on the New Year.

    Mars is hanging

  • slant January 14, 2018

    SUNRISE: January 14, 2018

    The wrong way to take refuge involves seeking shelter—worshipping mountains, sun gods, moon gods, deities of any kind simply because they would seem to be greater than we. This kind of refuge-taking is similar to the response of the little child who says, ‘If you beat me, I’ll tell my mommy,’ thinking that his mother is a great, archetypically powerful person. If he is attacked, his automatic recourse is to his mother, an invincible and all-knowing, all-powerful personality. The child believes his mother can protect him, in fact that she is the only person who can save him. Taking refuge in a