1. PREPARING THE CIRCLE. Here is my anti-pedigree. Here is my bronze-age Marvel, my Ligotti, my Fanon, my Disco Elysium because you condescend even though you don’t fucking read. Here is an essay, here is the thing that happened to me, here is a drink, here is a sunny, sated slice of afternoon during which you might roll over and say alright, fine. Will you let me smear chicken with caviar, now? Will you shut the fuck up about your ex with the “Lady Lazarus” tattoo?

2. PURIFYING THE CIRCLE. Hi, Ted! Did she deforest your soul by not letting you fuck every girl you ever wanted? Do you want to do my birth chart, much like the ex with the “Lady Lazarus” tattoo? Do you want me to take my shirt off and watch you gut a pike, so your restless heart can know it is less fake than mine? Do you want to tell me Robin Morgan came to you in a dream with a dead stag slung over her shoulders, and that is why feminists are crazy? Do you want to go back to the place the king of fucking England picked out for you on that lovely little moor? Okay! Bye-bye!

3. INTRODUCING YOURSELF. Do you think I know where to go? Do you think things are better? Every woman who’s ever loved Sylvia Plath has to be The Woman Who Loves Sylvia Plath. The electricity that squirmed within her for thirty years crazes Cambridge cobblestones, fattens the ozone in Wellesley, dances across the harbor on its way out to the sea. But even here you may sit in a swan boat and hear Dick Norton in Target jeans say he doesn’t get the big fucking deal. Go to Winthrop and watch the planes come in instead. 

4. INVOKING THE LAND. On Willow Street, in Beacon Hill, in a pretty brick building, she touched the dream with pale fingertips. Can you imagine everything you ever wanted? Can you imagine books, babies, and beef stews? Go to one of the wooden docks on the Esplanade, resolutely alone though there will be couples there. Walk all the way down Newbury Street without buying anything. Stand between Smoots. Fail to absorb the beauty of the skyline.

5. PIERCING THE VEIL. There’s this show on Apple TV+ called Dickinson, all about bringing the truth of a major female poet to light, and it puts her in pedal pushers and makes her talk like thiiiiiIIIIIIIiiiiiiiis.

6. GREETING THE GHOST. Eat like shit for a week. People only know about the shock therapy, not the insulin comas. Then rise, shower, and eat avocado halves stuffed with crab salad. Let the dawn terrify you. You are not a sinner but you are in the hands of an angry god and he will keep a good New England girl from knowing the difference. He will violate you with light when all you ever were was faithful clay. He will tell you there is no answer but the one that matters, but he won’t tell you what it is. He will make you leave. He will make you come back. He will keep you there.

7. CLOSING THE CIRCLE. Nothing but a beach will do. Lawless with sunshine, pagan in its flourishes – tidepools, teenagers. But it’s not enough. It will never fix this. You cannot go back and say, don’t listen to him, or him, or even him. Don’t waste your time. Come back home, or don’t. Courtney Love auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club by reading “Daddy” when she was 12 years old.

7a. I don’t even like this witchy shit. I’m not even this woman. But do you see how I am crouched here, in this squalid place? Do you see me? Do you see me?

8. LEAVING THE CIRCLE. Here is what happened. Here is the work. Here is the earth that held her until it couldn’t. Here are the women on the Red Line with something white and strange hidden up their sleeves. Here is the end of endings, the cauldron of morning escaped. Here is magic. Here is how little it means. Here is the answer, and the question you didn’t think to ask. Here are the bumblebees of the Arboretum, who taste the spring. Here is Sylvia. Here is the ghost.