July Horrorscopes

Aries (March 21-April 19) There's two dead women on a bench in the park. One of them is your aunt.

Taurus (April 20-May 20) He's been outside your house for days. He's staring at your family through your windows, scaring your children. Bash his fucking brains in with a hammer.

Gemini (May 21-June 21) Your father will abuse you; your father is violent. Imagine his hands on your mother's body.

Cancer (June 22-July 22) Stay away from children; they will cut your stomach open and crawl inside your body pretending to be the person they believe you are.

Leo (July 23-August 22) Put all the dead bodies in your kitchen in the the most remote cave in the State Park...that's the only way to get rid of that smell, pal.

Virgo (August 23-September 22) Scratch out your eyes, peel off your skin, tear off your genitals; die to yourself and die to this world.

Libra (September 23-October 23) Hang her by the tree in the back yard. She's asked you politely, after all.

Scorpio (October 24-November 21) We will carry your body through the streets: trumpets, trombones, snare drums, harps, gods; there's something dark in the forsaken corners where we hide from ourselves.

Sagittarius (November 22-December 21) You will raise your loved ones from the dead; now they are hens and various other types of small fowl.

Capricorn (December 22-January 19) You come home and someone has tied up your pets and made them watch an elaborately staged reenactment of the burning of Joan of Arc. Your living room is ruined! All that ash and all those dove feathers!

Aquarius (January 20-February 18) You've convinced yourself that you're the reincarnation of an 1840s gold prospector...but as a point of fact, you're not. Get rid of those six shooters and cowboy hats and stop using colloquialisms from the mid 19th century and you'll be just a little less lonesome and lost.

Pisces (February 19-March 20) Your mouth is on her mouth, life everlasting; she puts her hands on your genitals and you get an erection. Kiss her for hours, she's yours.

Centaur shit by the steaming mouthful

In a beach front bar with a throat full of bourbon and a heart full of savagery, I made a connection with a short haired brunette with a long flowing dress that draped the floor. We slipped into the bathroom and locked the door; frenzied hands stripping clothes from trembling bodies. In the midst of this ecstatic disrobing and in a state of extreme excitation, I discovered that my potential mate was a centaur. I was admittedly taken aback but with an erect genital organ and a cold mind full of dark Eros, I decided to do what I went in there to do. As I squared up to her backside hoping to not get kicked, she started shitting: foul, steaming piles of centaur shit. She stared me directly in the eyes and smiled, then she immediately started eating the dark brown shit by the mouthful. She looked up at me with her craned neck and with her mouth crammed to the cheeks with feces and asked if I'd like some. Not wanting to be rude and kind of intrigued, I bent down and put a bit in my mouth. It tasted like mythology and grain. Somebody was beating the door down, so we put our clothes back on and went our separate ways. I chased the centaur shit with another glass of Kentucky bourbon and passed out on the pier.

Mutter Museum--Philadelphia, PA

The Mutter Museum, a medical museum in Philly that is dedicated to physical abnormalities, curiosities and death elicits an admixture of awe, empathy and a profound sense of the often profane nature of physiological functions. Browsing through the photography depicting the human animal with remarkable deformities, the embalmed and distorted fetuses, the bones disfigured by gun shots, syphilis, pathogens or general misfortune I found myself deeply moved and marveling at the handiwork of the penumbral shaping hands. The lack of supposed moral acumen in the natural kingdom and it's startling purity is further evidence that the laws of man are meaningless and his godless civilization will mercifully crumble and vanish.

Haitian hearts in Lexington, KY

Beleaguered and harrowed by tenebrous and darksome dreams, Noah and I struck out in search of a meal in Lexington. We were fortunate enough to discover a street vendor whose exotic fare included roasted human hearts and genitals, a meal I greedily consumed with a rare gusto found only in the pentinent sinner who has fasted for weeks and is only now able to enjoy his feast with peace in his wounded heart and atonement in his grieving spirit. The heart tasted like pain and fear. The genitals were garnished with poisonous weeds and tasted bitter and unfulfilled. With a full belly and a heart so strange and wild, I saw and made avail of a brief opportunity to peer into the ghastly trailer when the proprietors left for a short break. Finding the back door unlocked, I discovered a grisly scene: black corpses decapitated and delicately carved up, heads on a spit with bulging eyes and knives between their teeth. Bringing the minimal extent of my anthropological insight to bear, I surveyed bone structure etc and decided that the cadavers were likely Haitian.

June Horrorscopes reprinted from Champs Quarterly

Aries (March 21-April 19) You will fill a bathtub with gasoline and human blood and set yourself on fire, dreaming of tenderness and silence.

Taurus (April 20-May 20) Swallow those flat round stones from the creek bed behind your house, then those vines will coil around your lonesome heart.

Gemini (May 21-June 21) You'll wake up in a cave three months from now totally nude with an empty bottle of bear juice lying next to you and think: did I marry a fucking black bear?

Cancer (June 22-July 22) Hang father by his tiny, wilting spermatazoa, crawl back into mother's bloated ovum.

Leo (July 23-August 22) Shark men are hiding in those wasp nests hanging from your gutter; listen to their wise shark words and learn about the murder in your heart.

Virgo (August 23-September 22) You've wondered what a human heart tastes like for too long; cut yours out and devour all the frenzy and longing.

Libra (September 23-October 23) You'll find love hiding in the dark forest; don't go in there without a machete. Love means to eviscerate you and dance like a wounded horse in the rain with your intestines draped around it's lovely body.

Scorpio (October 24-November 21) Your apartment complex will catch fire. Your husband will die. Your two children will die. You'll start a new life in the forest, drinking from the stream with wild dogs.

Sagittarius (November 22-December 21) Smear excrement on your face and hands, hide in the bushes and wait for your neighbor to come out of his house.

Capricorn (December 22-January 19) You've been thinking about the surgery for some time: Don't delay! Now is the time to have yourself transformed into a minotaur.

Aquarius (January 20-February 18) There's a dead animal in your bed. Dig a hole in the soft,wet earth and bury yourself alive with the dead beast.

Pisces (February 19-March 20) Put your hands on her buttocks. Kiss her mouth. Kiss her breasts.

I'd rather be down some dark holler where the sun refuses to shine

The dogs are all barking. Wonder who's coming up the driveway? I go into mom's room, but she's asleep. She doesn't know who's coming for me, she doesn't understand my dread. She hasn't seen my coughing up blood, she hasn't noticed that I'm short of breath. She's got her own weight to bear. When I seem down, she'll run her hands through my hair and tell me she understands. She doesn't know me. She only knows the person that life made me. I was laying in my bedroom one night and I saw the Angel of Death. She spoke in every language at once, but I understood what she said.

Dark god

With my love he became a god blossoming in the endless nights we spent away from our fellow beasts; a dark god concurrently devouring solar systems and my tiny, nude body that longed for continual fusion with his. Desperately cleaving, strangling like a loving vine. Truculent rituals and sacrifices were necessary to prepare my ugly, wounded heart for this arcane union; painful coalescence that we secreted in the sunless regions inside ourselves to protect and honor it's penumbral beauty. Like all heretics, we were forever fleeing the orthodox who would bind and restrain this sacred thing that was ours alone; to attempt to name it, to map it's boundaries and borders, to restrict something so strange and wild is to extinguish it, to stifle it's rabid virility and reckless frailty that by virtue of it's extreme frailty had to be preserved at all costs. In the car with our hands clasped we drove all night; nocturnal creatures bathing in blessed moonlight. We grew tired and our car crashed but we continued driving, eternally evading our harrowing, hounding pursuers; driving toward something that we achingly longed for, toward a repose that shocks with it's simplicity and gentle, auroral light.