ANOTHER WORLD IS NOT ONLY POSSIBLE, SHE IS ON HER WAY ON A QUIET DAY I CAN HEAR HER BREATHING*

In this moment of remarkable pressure
being experienced by teachers / being
leveraged on teachers to do a good job to
deliver the experience / pressure to
compensate for the present / pressure to
show your work show your worth / the
sense that people are going into this
semester with a different kind of
vulnerability/…
What calls do you answer. What fires cue your fire.

Sara Jane Stoner, using excerpts from Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, “the university: last words”¹

This poetry pep talk/poetics essay/spell poem is brought to you by the High Priestess, the Hermit, Judgment, and Justice and is part of a larger project of confusing poetics and living, living and magic, magic and poetics. I offer it to you as a welcome antidote to whatever personal hell you, too, are in—whether that involves healing from past trauma, negotiating major life changes, engaging in political activism, compensating for the present in your learning or your teaching, returning from spiritual exile, or simply having something to say and the voice to speak it.

Why? Confuse poetics and living, living and magic, magic and poetics? Together, magic and poetry can reconnect us to our intuition; can catalyze us to explore aspects of the human psyche that we might otherwise choose to ignore or disregard out of fear, shame, anger, anxiety; can reintegrate creativity into daily life and jolt us into poems we didn’t know we had inside us; can rewire our perceptual habits; can help us to listen to our irrational selves; can support us as we imagine our way through—as opposed to going around—crisis; and can incite us to surrender to the truth of a large, interconnected, and complex humanity.

Because you are reading a poetics essay/spell poem, I believe you are capable of maintaining

*Arundhati Roy ended her 2003 speech “Confronting Empire” with this phrase.

suspension of disbelief. I believe you, too, know that words are magic. Maybe you have forgotten how to spin magic with your words, and you want to remember. Maybe you already remember how to spin magic with your words, and you want to play, with consequence.

Either way: come play with me. And then, by all means, make up your own rules for the game.

Step One: Copy and fold the square paper fortune teller below. If you need help, ask a child.

Step Two: Use the fortune teller to generate a pop-up mini pep talk:

Slide your left thumb and index finger of each hand behind two of the pictures.

Repeat with your right thumb and index finger.

Press your fingers together so the images bend and touch.

Hold the fortune teller in your two hands, with the pictures on the outside.

Pick the image that most captures your imagination, today.

Spell the word that first comes to mind, while opening and closing the flaps in rhythm with the letters.

Open the fortune teller to the second layer, revealing Tarot cards. Pick the one that most inspires you, right now.

Count to the corresponding number, while opening & closing the flaps in rhythm with the numbers.

Pick another number, open the corresponding flap, and receive your poetry pep talk!

Step 3: You can approach whatever “pep talk” you receive as a writing prompt, a personal mantra, a motto for the day, a topic for conversation, a lens for viewing the world, and/or as an invitation to cast a spell.

SPELL CASTING 101

Like a poem, a spell is a glass window. Some people barely notice it. To them it’s see-through or just reflects random things. To others it means the world; they love it, stop and stare, because they see themselves inside it.² However you choose to craft a spell using the ingredients below, do it so you can see yourself inside it: your true self, the one you have forgotten how to remember.

A good spell is equal parts intention and flexibility. Like a poem, the spell creates an intentional space for you to manifest whatever it is you need to manifest—and it’s quite possible that you don’t know what you need, so it’s important to leave the spell open to chance. Hence the mix and match ingredients below.

Like poems, spells like containers, like the four directions or the four elements or four planes of motion or four parts of the body or four Tarot cards or four Muses.

There are spells for clarifying, spells for protection, spells for breaking bonds, spells for divining paths (where there was none), spells for healing, spells for