MAD ZODIAC

Leo Sun, Virgo Moon, Aries Rising

by Rebecca Hawkes 


Sometimes you have to break a woman’s heart

          to really understand your natal chart. A breakup

dire enough to compare birth certificates—

trace back the exact minute of my entrance, or when

            it all went bad. Psychoanalysis by zodiac. Catch me

newly Aries rising, years mistaken about my stellations.

So the price of starry nights is astronomical.

            The spiral horns of hangover bestowed upon

a prone cat-pose. The ruling sun  roars me awake,

tosses her blazing mane over the day. I’m three decades

            a lioness and not unlearning pride. Nor the rough-

tongued taste for amber ale lapped from bottomless jugs,

satisfying as a river of blood. I’ll sleep it off,

            just like our father does. Centaur galloping

home to his cups. We say our cheers

and are raised up. Forgive me for I have believed

            in the inherent glory of the scene— organs failing

gaily in the wake of revelry. Oh but every angel

risen to their portion of last night’s karaoke chorus.

            I could not be touched by beauty and go unbruised.

And yet the small indecency of this shower nectarine:

no punishment for succulence. What sin

            in a juiceless wrist, the skin not stained

by sweetness? Forgive us even that first fruit’s

blush: Eve saw the bobbing Adam’s apple

            and tore at it with her teeth. Me? In the garden

I'm all seraph— flaming sword aloft, no fig leaf.

Surely there’s water enough to cleanse me

            in the saltless oceans of this state. A salmon upstream

scarletly unrecognizable with lust, I swim wrong rivers

farther from my heartland. Lions, too, will plunge

            in any current that will take them— if only while hunting

for affection. And I’ll remember to grow legs 

again. All fours, retching: wretched sphinx 

            upon the shower floor. This evening, upright, 

crowned in selenite and ram’s-horn gypsum, 

I’ll tell some honey swaying on a barstool 

            of the time I was so thirsty I drank my dead. 

I had my death of them. And I was fed.





Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter-poet from rural Aotearoa New Zealand. Her first book was Meat Lovers (AUP), finalist for the US Lambda Literary Awards and winner of a UK Laurel Prize. She edits NZ poetry journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the anthology No Other Place to Stand. Rebecca recently completed an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan in the US, where her poems have won contests from Palette Poetry, Salt Hill, the Hopwood Awards, and the Academy of American Poets. Recent work has found homes in places like the Threepenny, Georgia and Missouri Reviews. Her illuminated-manuscript chapbook HIDE is forthcoming from Ngā Pukapuka Pekapeka in Aotearoa, and her next full-length collection will be published by Yes Yes Books and Auckland University Press in 2027.