Birth Chart

Rachel Feder

• Publisher: Excelsior Editions
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438479361
• eBook ISBN: 9781438479378
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

A collection of poems weaving together astrology, motherhood, music, and literary history.

In Birth Chart, a collection of heartfelt, ruthless poetry, Rachel Feder rethinks the relationship between astrology and motherhood. She asks, if astrology constellates the universe around the moment of one's birth, then how might it serve as shorthand for a vast number of personal experiences and cultural phenomena? How might it speak to and of friendship, motherhood, authorship, the mysteries of literary history, and the wonders of watching a child come into language? Across four sections, including a serial poem in sustained conversation with the modernist poet H.D., Feder's references range from group texts to the Talmud to '90s song lyrics. In her hands-and her inimitable yet familiar, often straight-up funny voice-astrology is less a means of explaining the world than of communicating, of capturing a feeling, of sealing a bond. The result is an equally sentimental and sardonic collection in which "the language of explanation is a heart emoji. It means you know what I mean." And we do.

II

Lunar Fragments for the Scorpion Child

This is a lunar fragment

for the scorpion child

who will not sleep, the stripes of his pajama shirt

against the dinosaurs of his pajama pants, the bonnie

he calls bunny who lies over the ocean, oh bring back

my bunny to me, oh

lie down, scorpion child

I had a strange Yom Kippur

insofar as I did not fast

insofar as I reread Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

while the child slept on

me last time I read Lucy I shared a tent

with Chet by the snake

preserve, snakes on the desert floor

and in glass terrariums,

this was before we met our husbands.

Today a bee flew into my hair and became tangled in my half-knot, my

scorpion mother pulled it out with her hands and was, unsurprisingly, stung.

I don’t know what happened to the bee.

The first time I read Lucy I couldn’t get over her mother’s letters,

how she hoards them in her room and won’t open them and won’t

read them, even the letter marked urgent. It occurs to me that I am fundamentally

a person who opens letters

and apologizes, which Lucy never seems to do, which is what Yom Kippur is for, or is supposed to be for, not that I spent it apologizing.

The day broke into night and the moon hung by halves and the scorpion child clutched my shoulders as if frightened by the brightness of the stars. I know even before I look it up that Jamaica Kincaid is a Gemini. My moon is in Gemini

but I’m still learning what that means

At the Vermeer exhibit

the scorpion child called every lute

a guitar a white-haired woman

pointed at him and said I want you to remember this when you’re 15!

I wanted to say

he really doesn’t

have to that’s not how

art works I wanted to shout Vermeer was a Scorpio too you can tell

by the skin which always seems to be

on fire at air & space there are three stones

from the moon that I want to put in the poem without explanation

the way you could hide them in a neighbor’s garden and nobody would notice

basalt and we stood among the butterflies anorthosite where a pink-spotted cattleheart

refused to give up her Taurean secrets (typical) & a morpho perched on us both

at the same time for a moment

for some brave and stupid reason you let the volunteer convince you

to touch the Madagascar hissing cockroach hold the caterpillar hopper stick insect

the moon waxed from Pisces into Aries breccia which means nothing to me

The scorpion child says his favorite animal is the moon,

then laughs & says giraffe. The moon

is exalted in Jackson Pollock’s chart. I said I could do that & my scorpion mother

said but you didn’t & it’s super true, I didn’t

so mazel tov Aquarius king &

happy 106th today theoretically you could have

made it to the party.

The color orange extremely is a Gemini.

The color orange is talking to you. My Gemini moon

a harvest moon rises like a clementine. It rises

oh my darling like an animal

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Slippage
• Lunar Fragments for the Scorpion Child
• Serpentine
• Other People’s Scorpions
• Notes and Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Back Cover