MAD ZODIAC

Leo Sun, Virgo Moon, Aries Rising

by Rebecca Hawkes 


It’s all a matter of inheritance. Show a lesbian
your birth certificate— she’ll tell you
why you’re doomed before the circus music starts.

But sometimes you have to break a woman’s heart
to really understand your natal chart. A breakup
dire enough to call my mother, tracing back

the minute of my birth, or where it all went bad.
Psychoanalysis by zodiac. Catch me newly Aries rising—
years mistaken about my stellations. The price of starry nights

is thereby astronomical. The spiral horns of hangover
bestowed upon a prone cat-pose. The ruling sun
roars me awake, tosses her flaming mane over the day.

I'm three decades a lioness and not unlearning pride.
Nor the rough-tongued taste for amber ale— damp topaz
lapped from bottomless jugs, satisfying as a river of blood.

I’ll sleep it off, just like a 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— debauched organs failing gaily
in the wake of revelry. Oh but every angel risen
to their portion of the karaoke chorus. I could not

be touched by beauty and go untouched. Hence
the small indecency of this shower nectarine. Forgive
this juiceless wrist, the skin unstained by sweetness.

That first fruit’s blush: Eve sees the bobbing
Adam’s apple torn out with the teeth. Me? I'm all seraph—
flaming sword, no fig leaf. A salmon upstream

scarletly unrecognizable with lust, I move through water
farther from my heartland. My father’s last cigar
drops from his raft into the current. The dolphins

do not know whether to smoke it by the mouth
or from the blowhole. It’s true that lions can swim
to find affection. And I’ll remember to grow legs

again. On 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 hungry I ate my dead.
I drank 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 Pacific climate poetics 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 USA, where her poems have won prizes from Palette Poetry, Salt Hill, the Hopwood Awards, and the Academy of American Poets, while her new manuscripts have been finalists with Alice James, Green Linden, and Yes Yes Books. Recent work has found homes in places like the Threepenny, Georgia and MissouriReviews. Her illuminated-manuscript 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 2026.