ghost stories
a poem about my ghosts and yours
Hi lovelies,
I’m a little late this week! Sorry about that. To say I am struggling would be accurate, but so are so many of us right now. I hope you’re doing okay, and that you’ve been able to enjoy this October for everything it’s had to give so far, and I hope you have a wonderful Halloween planned—whether it’s a costume party, a night spent watching scary movies with your favorite people (spooky over scary preferred for me), or celebrating Samhain with a few spicy witchy rituals. Trust, there’s a newsletter all about that last one incoming!
This week I have a poem for you. I’ve been working at it and working at it and I think I’m ready I’m going to go ahead and release it into the ether of all your inboxes now.
This newsletter is free, but you can support my work by buying me a coffee here if you feel so inclined.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Of course it’s the time of ghost stories—decay hand-in-hand with disguise, cider and smoke and jack-o-lanterns lit from within so they can grin their fiendish grins, laying claim to the time of all things that mask themselves under the brunt of day but never fail to go bump in the mischievous night. I have my ghosts, and you yours. The July spirits spoke to me, and the women who died in the Paradise fires that year I returned home from Copenhagen to plumes of smoke staining the sky and ash in all the windowsills: women whose anger tattooed them to this life, whose skin dripped from their bones in gruesome displays of flesh I have not seen before or since, whose ringing accusation I carry with me still. And of course, there’s the hooded plastic skeleton with the moldable hands, the one I hang in my apartment year in and year out to grimace and greet me across the passage of time, the one who may or may not also be my sleep paralysis demon (a friend and I named him Victor). I have the faux blood-stained tablecloths, pumpkins, dried herbs and spices, the ritual candles and oils— and all the ghosts from when I still lived in that pale green house in the Presidio, where I spotted one on the grass outside that restaurant I kept meaning to return to and while walking through the eucalyptus trees at night as they busied themselves peeling off their fragrant dresses. The night an owl followed me through the darkness, keeping me company with the flash of its massive snowy wings: don’t worry, I still have that. I won’t put it down. But I was supposed to be smaller, right? I would write my poems, place my crystals just so and pull my tarot cards too, wondering why I’m still asking the same questions of the Universe, or else of my Self. (My deck may be wondering that, too—and judging me for it.) I would even do a spell or two, for you, and you would tell everyone that you dated this witch once. One who can’t help but say yes to things still, a great resounding Yes to more and more and more each hungry piles of disjointed things, as if my energies aren’t wholly dictated by the moon, as if the world would never tell me No. Not for the first time, I wish I could reveal in conversation the worlds, new and old, that are at the ready when I write. When the words of the mythworkers spill out of me, the Shahrazads and the Persephones, and if you really want a story ask a Persian for their ghosts— about their history of their family, but especially what their family was doing in the early 1980s. Here I am now in this time of ghost stories, yours and mine. Here I am hurtling through space in an unruly brown body. I know that my ancestors are with me— and that they would be stunned to see this emotional Juggernaut of a girl racing around her dingy colorful city all breathless, tangled long dark hair and winking sequins. I think about what I used to have— a vigor that astounds me now, even just a few years later; but if I used to that means I can again. And if we can again we have not yet lost that thing most integral to youth which is not hope but an unrelenting insistence, an unassailability against age and death that is nonetheless belied by the moldering zombie flesh made manifest by our scary movies and our YouTube beauty tutorials. Both haunted and haunting. Still I have my ghosts, I would never willingly give them up and when I spit out my pomegranate seeds, I tell the stories, and it’s as if someone sitting beside me has turned the volume all the way UP inside my brain. So I remind myself I am alive, I am so fucking alive with it: my alone that is not alone, that was never alone but has been stumbling with me, holding my hand through the softening dark all this time.
The girls and women of Iran still need our help. Here are some ways you can support the revolution.
Additional reads:
This powerful Teen Vogue interview in which writer Fortesa Latifi spoke with Neda, a 28-year-old woman who lives in Iran and has been protesting there (her name was changed for her own safety).
“My grief connected me to the country and to the people; my personal loss of family, language, and culture mirrored a larger loss, one that comes from generations of Iranians made hyphenated. But I know this: Everything comes to an end, even empires and despots, even grief and separation.” This moving article in The Cut written by memoirist Neda Toloui-Semnani.
The below Oldster Magazine story, penned by writer and director Naz Riahi—a heartbreaking piece on her experiences as a child in post-revolution Iran before and after her father was brutally executed by the regime, when she and her mother were forced to become political refugees.
Follow @Naz Riahi, @from____iran, and Karim Sadjadpour. (Of course, there are so many more; these accounts are just top of mind for me atm. Please feel free to drop more in the comments.)
Thank you for continuing to amplify their voices.
I’m taking a break from the newsletter next week, but I’ll be back with that special Halloween/Samhain edition of Cosmic Kudos on the 31st. Until then, stay spooky, my friends. 🖤
xx
Kimia