It’s time to call. Every minute is vital; everything can
change in just one minute. She taught me that.
I pick up the handset, the faint purr of the dial tone
radiating out of my palm. Night shadows and reflected
neon from street signage play across my frozen figure,
my olive skin that is more like his was, than hers.
It’s a powerful thing, fear, the not of not-knowing.
After they get to know my mother and what she can do,
no client ever calls her Jo again, not even Joanne. They’re
too afraid to call her anything, really, by the end, when
they’re walking away with their progressions and transits
and retrogrades clutched in their cold, trembling fingers.
All the knowledge brought down by one small woman in
a flannel shirt and faded pedal pushers.
Over time she’s come to be known as The Astrologer.
And me? The Astrologer’s Daughter.
When I answer the door, see, that’s what they say.
And though I, more than anyone, should know that
the stars are impersonal—they wheel and grind and turn
without reference to our wants or needs or desires—my
mother, Joanne Nielsen Crowe, didn’t deserve what’s
already come to pass, just because she let it.
She let it.
That’s what has shaken me most. She did not fight
it. She stopped running, and let it—the eventuality, the
black hole she foresaw in her own future that she would
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