But I performed Guernica I and II from memory at the last Honeybee Sage open mic of the summer. I’ll probably post the video of it tomorrow. For now, however, I’m exhausted.
Goodnight, y’all.
-Allēna
Tag: guernica
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Alchemy
Hello, everyone. This is Lazarus, your trusty sorcerer once again reporting for duty. I’m taking a break from my post election emotions to write and dump my thoughts out here since my brain seems to be going at top speed and has refused to slow down since last night. I’m currently writing beside the lovely Zelda to help keep me focused. We have chosen the same question to unpack on our respective blogs. That question is a very interesting and timely one. It is: “have you ever regretted not forgiving someone?”
I have a perspective on forgiveness that people might find controversial. I’ve experienced a great deal of betrayal both personally and systematically, and I personally don’t believe that forgiveness is necessary for healing or at all, really. Nor can I ever say I’ve ever truly forgiven anyone in a typical sense. My inability to forget most things that have ever happened to me makes true forgiveness as most people understand it impossible. However, I would say that instead of forgiving people, I learn from the pain and the person who harmed me and alchemize the pain into other things and my own growth and progress.
I do my best to see myself as a student of the world and to practice that every day. I’m also a practicing Stoic. I got that philosophy from the early physician, alchemist, and pioneer of toxicology, Paracelsus, who lived during the Renaissance and was also an avid student of the world. He was also a cocky little bitch, which is part of why I love him so much. He got his cocky ass handed to him in his youth after college, which blew his mind open and he started learning from everyone he could. He traveled all over the known world, collecting knowledge and listening to stories. This led him to write, “The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, [Romani]*, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveler.… Knowledge is experience”.
I’m not perfect at that, and anyone who knows me knows I’m a fucking hothead myself. But I’m learning slowly to take my anger at situations or the world and use it to build constructive things and learn from the world and my pain rather than to destroy my progress. I consider this in and of itself a form of alchemy. I’m doing my best to slow down and meet people where they are day in and day out. The vitamin B100 supplement I started taking as a shot in the dark a few weeks ago has done wonders to help me slow down and regulate my legendary anger and use it constructively. Emerson has noticed that I’m much more steady this way, and has gotten me more supplements, thank the gods.
However, some people simply do not want to grow or change and we’ll never see eye to eye. I learn from them, too. I consider those sorts of people masterclasses in what not to do and how I don’t want to live my life. So I shadow them, too. I observe what I like about them, what I enjoy about how they’re living their lives, what results their actions are getting, and what I like and dislike about those results. Then I determine whether I want to continue to be in their life and act accordingly.
My mother, Hera, as much as she has hurt me, once gave me some sage advice in this regard. She said something to the effect of: “If you want a healthy marriage, ask someone with a healthy marriage for advice. Don’t go to someone for advice who’s been divorced three times and is working on a fourth time. If you want to be rich, ask a millionaire for advice. Don’t go to someone who’s broke and drowning in debt. They won’t know what they’re talking about.”
However, I would like to offer a corollary to that. Observe everyone. Including the people who have hurt you. What did they do that you admired? A stopped clock is right twice a day. What did they do that caused them to hurt you? What were their strengths? What were their weaknesses? Do you have the same strengths and weaknesses? Did they do the same things that irritated you that you do? Nobody is perfect. If you want to grow and heal, learn from everyone, good and bad, and then apply what you’ve learned in your own life, both in terms of what you want to do and what you don’t want to do anymore.
For example, I don’t admire most things about Hera. However, she is human, and she is my mother, so we have a few traits in common. I can’t say I’ve forgiven her, and I doubt I ever will. However, I have learned from her, and in many ways, I would venture to say that I know her better than she knows herself.
I know that she is very, very driven, very protective of her people, pushes herself to extremes to be productive, and is terrified to the core of missing out on opportunities that might get her ahead in life. I also know that she attempts to show the world an image of slick perfection and “having it all together” and as such becomes defensive and ruthless to mask any sign of vulnerability.
I also know myself well, I would say, and we share the same drive, the same protectiveness, and the same desire to project a confident image to the world. However, I’ve been doing my best to stay on top of my shadow work, while she, to the best of my knowledge, has not.
I didn’t like her underhandedness, explosiveness, and slick dishonesty when met with a challenge to her rigid worldview and perfect self image, so I do my utmost to work on myself in order to not be like her and to root her toxicity out of my life. I would also say that I’m no longer angry at her most days. Hurt, yes. Grieving, absolutely. I wish my mother had seen me and accepted me for who I was, but I have also accepted the facts of the situation for what they are and am working with them.
Personally, I wholeheartedly believe these are reasonable things to feel, given the circumstances, and I don’t owe her shit. However, I owe it to myself and the people I do care about to work on the unhealthy trauma responses I got from being raised in the environment she created, to have excellent boundaries so that I don’t find myself in a situation like that again, and to pour love and care into myself and others as genuinely and freely as I’m able. Both of those things coexist simultaneously. So I shall continue to take what I like from my upbringing and my experience and leave the rest in the past.
I’ll close with another quote from Paracelsus:
“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”
Think on that and consider which things in your life are poison at which doses, and in light of that, what you want to leave in the past. I’ll do the same.
Stay tuned for more magic, beautiful people. I’ll be around soon.
Your strangely wired sorcerer,
Lazarus
*the original phrasing included a slur, so I edited it to change it to the proper word.
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“Guernica” Part 4: Alchemy and Bravery
Hey everyone! This is your boy Eight once more. We took a short break from writing yesterday because we took a lot of emotional damage from writing Part 3 the other day. Kalla handled Part 3 since she wasn’t directly traumatized by any of the events of “Guernica”. However, she felt deeply for Allēna and her teenage plight and still sobbed while she wrote it. So a break was in order. I’m back today to discuss “Guernica” Part 4 and how Allēna held both the visceral and the beautiful in equal measure and alchemized her pain.
We’re gonna do this the same way we did the other three parts (which you can read here, here, and at the link above respectively). I’m gonna show you my performance, then the section’s text, and then I’ll break it down for you. As previously stated in the other posts, you can read the full poem in our collection Singing Molten Gold To The Morning. Without further ado, “Guernica” Part 4!
“Guernica” Part 4: My Performance
I perform “Guernica” Part 4 for y’all! The Text
guernica part iv.
you can paint darkness
and you can paint conflict
but there’s only so much you can paint
if you have never experienced it
i want to paint as much as i possibly can.
etxea is the basque word for home and i find home in things
that hold no home for others.
i feel heard in horror stories and seen in the shocking and visceral.
i’ve made mansions out of sadness and i destroy the happy ones
because something in me
says i don’t deserve them.
fuck that something.
fuck that something.
i’ve seen enough and yet i haven’t
desperation guides my lungs and my mind.
i’ve had enough.
this is why i write now.
when i was 12 they called me selfish
i think in hindsight it was because i wanted love
and they couldn’t give it to me
so i fought with the wind.
i knew i couldn’t chase it
so i fought it. i fought anything
that moved for so long and so hard
that i forgot how to make peace.
it kept me alive..
when i was 7, my dad got sick
and i think that was the beginning of the end.
that was when the war began and it didn’t end
not until i was 18 and by that time, the damage was done.
when i get sad, my inner child screams and cries
and wants love from people unable to provide it.
i wish one of them would’ve told me i was okay
instead of pretending i was the bomb in the corner
or the crazy one in the attic
the scapegoat,
or the black sheep.
i’m not crazy.
what they did was wrong.
sometimes you’re the airplane high in the sky
the reason why they don’t look up anymore
and for a long time
that was them.
i look up now to spite them and ask where
their god is now
now that they’ll make their own hell someday
and have no one to wipe their bloody hands on.I Look Up Now
The gorgeous crystal blue sky Allēna would gaze up at to spite her family around the time she wrote “Guernica” Part 4 (with some light edits added for pizzazz), June 2019. My Thoughts
Like we’ve said in many other posts, we were born fighters. “Guernica” Part 4, to me, sings to me like victory, a victory incredibly hard won. Part 4 marks the transition from victim to victor. She starts to go from someone who had always cowered in fear and allowed others to control the narrative to someone who owned her damn self, owned her voice, and owned her demons. This is the voice of a poet who says “Yeah, I’ve been through some fucked shit, but I’m a powerful alchemist. And goddamnit, I’m going to turn this pain into a powerful story. The world will know what they did to me. The world will know where I came from and where the fuck I’m going. And news flash: it’s a far cry from this hell you people dragged me through.”
Around the time she wrote this, she was beginning to understand that what her mother’s family had done to her was terribly wrong. She didn’t deserve an ounce of that torture. Three things set her down that path to self discovery – the first kind and skilled psychiatrist she’d ever had, the novella Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and some very important friendships.
Hera’s Plot Begins To Unravel: Allēna’s Compassionate Psychiatrist
You may recall from an earlier post in the series that Hera, our mother, had essentially press ganged us into a medication regimen we didn’t need in an effort to get Allēna, who was the system’s host at the time, to be more compliant and easier to mold into an image her and her family wanted her to be. She vehemently denies this to this day, but she’s lied about everything else up to this point. This is the only explanation that makes any sense.
By the time she even married our first husband, she was on enough of these psychiatric medications to be about a quarter dissociated at all times. Her previous psychiatrists had her on dangerous levels of three different medications – lithium, lamotrigine, and Abilify. All three of these drugs are mood stabilizers. Lithium is essentially a pharmacological lobotomy, and is very harmful for a developing brain. She was put on it at the age of eighteen. I got the body off of it at 23, and mercifully our brain recovered. I’ve heard that most people aren’t so lucky. Often the damage to the thyroid and the resulting cognitive dulling is permanent.
A Chilling Concern
However, the lithium wasn’t what our very compassionate psychiatrist in Alaska was concerned about, which I frankly find telling. She was concerned about the lamotrigine. Upon meeting with her for the first time, she informed Allēna that she was on the highest dose of lamotrigine she had ever seen in her entire career. This woman had been practicing for longer than we’d been alive. She asked Allēna if she could remember how or why her dose was so high.
Our psychiatrist looked like she had seen a ghost when Lēna informed her that no, she had no clue. The dose she was on just wasn’t working, so her doctors kept raising it, often at Hera’s insistence. Hera would often come to our psychiatrist appointments and speak over Allēna, which would piss her off. Then Hera would turn around and use her reaction as evidence for why the dose should be raised.
Sick And Fucking Tired of Hera’s Bullshit
Allēna hated that Hera came with her to most of her appointments, had access to her medical information, and ultimately went to great lengths to keep Hera out of most everything. Hera believed she had a right to control Allēna’s medical care, psychiatry especially, since she was the one paying for it. Privacy laws could get fucked, in her opinion. Her money, her rules. Allēna hated it and hated her for the reactive abuse and other abuses of all stripes.
She didn’t want the meds at all or deal with another adult meddling in her life. Hera had inserted herself into our affairs our entire life and we had been sick of it since Castor was host at about the age of five. She wanted to have a conversation with Hera, adult to adult, about her abuse. But Hera would never do it. So she kept as much from her as possible, which wasn’t very possible in a house in which she had little to no privacy.
Shaking Off Her Chains
Getting out from under Hera’s thumb and finding a psychiatrist that listened was an immense relief. But it did Hera no favors. As she worked with her psychiatrist to come down off of the meds, she found herself viscerally angry at Hera. She cut her off and made her wrath no secret. This took immense courage on her part, as Hera was well-connected and had eyes everywhere, including in Fang, which we’d find out later.
The Next Piece of “Guernica” Part 4: Fahrenheit 451
The next inspiration for “Guernica” Part 4 came about by chance. Allēna was working as a tutor when she wrote the poem. A potential student reached out, asking if she could lecture on Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. She agreed, despite having never read the book. So she devoured it in preparation for the lesson, which never actually ended up happening. However, the book changed her life. She saw herself in the characters and the sharp, quick prose.
She saw how the characters who thought for themselves and read books were persecuted and their possessions burned – and saw her life story in the narrative. Hera homeschooled us for most of our education, and taught us how to critically think and analyze literature. Hera herself had a background as a professional seventh-grade English teacher, and was just as masterful a teacher as she was a cold, abusive, and emotionally absent mother. It’s because of her that we can write blog posts like this. She started us very young. Yet, she punished us harshly when we used those skills to criticize the way she treated us. What a cruel, ironic turn of events!
Allēna found solace within the pages of Fahrenheit, a sort of solace we’d not found in many years. I think the last book she’d related to that hard was Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Card’s politics and beliefs aside, Ender‘s Game is a harrowing illustration of what it’s like to be young, gifted, different, and traumatized, much like Fahrenheit is. We still want to get Fahrenheit’s opening line tattooed on the body somewhere. It was a pleasure to burn…
A Resolve Stronger Than Iron
What she’d found in this book and in turn, in herself, strengthened her resolve. She told her story without shame and spat in the faces of anyone who told her she should make up with Hera and consider her perspective. Hera had betrayed her repeatedly. Why should she? She’d had Hera’s perspective shoved down her fucking throat her entire tenure as host. She could recite all her talking points verbatim by that point. Hearing them again was a waste of time and would only piss her off. Hera wanted to control us, and by then, Allēna couldn’t be bothered to give a damn. She had seen Hera for who she was, a conniving snake, and we’ve never given two shits about people like that. Why waste her time on a person who’d only betray her again as soon as she found an opportunity to do so?
The Final Seed of “Guernica” Part 4: A Little Help From Her Friends
Yes, Allēna and the rest of us didn’t want to waste our time on traitorous bitches, but there were many people in our life by that point that were worth our time and effort. Beginning in early 2019, Allēna started making many friends online once it became clear to her that she wouldn’t have much luck making friends locally. Many of the local townsfolk were polite, but just as withdrawn as Fang. She wasn’t going to get anywhere in person with Fang as jealous and controlling as he was, either. If someone even looked in our direction with what looked to be romantic or sexual intent, he’d lose his fucking shit and go as far as to blame Lēna.
So she struck out on her own online and simply stopped introducing her friends to Fang. He’d inevitably start heavily criticizing them behind closed doors, as well. It was no fun for anyone, so she kept her life to herself and stopped asking about his, as well. She wasn’t going to give a flying fuck about someone’s private life or creations when he clearly couldn’t extend the same courtesy.
A Cradle of Masterworks
Many of her friends showed her and later Peri what healthy love actually looked like. They treated her far better than any partner ever had and expected nothing in return except her presence. They were also genuine fans of her work and encouraged her to write and share to her heart’s content. It was this supportive semi-secret virtual environment that helped Allēna begin to process what Hera and her cronies had done to her. Through this process, “Guernica” Part 4 and the full poem spilled out of her.
Peri’s magnum opus, The Secret History of Doloras, was born a few months later in the same supportive cradle. We attribute the fact that our album Light on the Final Day saw the light of day (ha!) at all to one especially loving and persistent friend all the way across the world, as well. We would have never found our voice or the courage to alchemize all of our deep, deep pain without the support and love our friends gave us.
Parting Thoughts on “Guernica” Part 4 (another pun, haha)
In my opinion, Allēna is exceptionally brave. Not only did she stand up to our formidable spymaster of a mother for the first time in our entire family’s history, she persevered through severe neglect and abuse of all stripes and found the guts in the meantime to turn that pain into something aching, visceral, and profoundly beautiful. I fucking love this poem and respect the hell out of my fiery pint sized headmate. I wish she’d had an easier lot in life, but I don’t know if we’d be half as insightful as we are without it. There can be no wisdom without experience and no pain without beauty. Allēna, sweet woman, is one of the rare few that is able to see beauty in the horrible things that happened to her and use these gems to craft a new story, one of resilience, courage, defiance, and ultimately – magic.
Speaking of magic, stay tuned for more of THAT. Part Five is coming up before you know it! Are you ready for another kick in the pants?!
Bastardly yours,
EightBefore you go, we’ve been WebFingered (Jesus, that joke never gets old!) and have triumphantly entered the Fediverse! Follow us @opensorceryy everywhere that’s federated!
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“Guernica” Part 3: The Brain Is The Bomb
Hey, everyone! My name is Kalla. I’m one of the alters in the Ashley system. I haven’t posted here before, but I think having a cool space where we can write about what the fuck ever is a pretty neat idea, so I want to put my two cents in where “Guernica” Part 3 is concerned.
It’s also a bit too soon for the other alters to write about this shit, as many of them consider Part 3 to be the most gut-wrenching and soul-searing part of the poem. So I have stepped in to get them through this fucked up block they’re having and maybe process some of the grief on their behalf. If you are just now coming across this series in the wild, you can find Parts One and Two here and here. And as previously stated in the posts Eight and Ellie wrote, you can find the full poem in our poetry collection Singing Molten Gold to the Morning.
I think this post will follow roughly the same structure of the others – Eight’s performance first, then the text, then my thoughts on it. Without further ado, “Guernica” Part 3!
Eight’s Performance
Eight’s performance of “Guernica” Part 3. The Text of “Guernica” Part 3
guernica iii.
airplanes up in the sky..
i know airplanes.
of course i do.
sometimes you’re the bomber,
sometimes you’re the little town in basque country
down below.
i like to think god laughs at tragedy
so that at least someone finds it funny.
but a brain is the bomb
and there’s a cruel irony in it eating itself
when it was the best brain i’ve ever known.
the roads were clogged with rubble and there was
no way out
there never was
not when the brain is the bomb
and you’re the little town in basque country
down below.
not when the brain belonged to your favorite person
and the bomb is also a death sentence in an MRI scan
and the execution date is to be determined.
so many bombs
making a hole in a heart
so deep that i’m still trying to find the bottom of it
(there’s no bottom)
but i will not die here when i’ve died 10 million times
already and i’m choking on this metaphor as i write
no harm in 10 million and 1
Allēna, summer 2019.
Our father, Xavier, whose death at the age of 47 from brain cancer inspired “Guernica” Part 3 with baby us in what must’ve been fall of 1997, early 1998. My Thoughts
“Guernica” Part 3 is about our father, Xavier, dying when we were 18. He had brain cancer for eleven years. It was a shadow over our entire fucking childhood.
We knew Xavier was going to die from the time we were seven years old. This wasn’t due to any kind of intuitive knowing. He collapsed at the gym a few days prior and fell into a tonic-clonic seizure. He found out what had caused the seizure a short while later, a brain tumor.
We weren’t shielded from any of that. Our parents sat us down at the round kitchen table in the rumpus room and told us everything, sparing no details. This was a terrible burden for a child to bear, especially a highly intelligent child who had already seen too much pain by the age of seven. We had already attended more funerals than weddings, and would go on to lose even more people we deeply loved before even losing him.
A Death Sentence In An MRI Scan, And The Execution Date Is To Be Determined
In 2013, when Allēna was already battling the beginnings of a severe depressive spell that would make her crave death for the better part of the next decade, Xavier got even more terrible news. He went in for a routine MRI scan to see if his tumor – named Cuato by then – had grown any larger. The oncologists came back with good news and bad news. The first tumor hadn’t grown any, but they had found a second one. It turned out to be completely separate from Cuato, called a second primary tumor. This tumor was far more aggressive, and he was given months to live. Though he shattered expectations and went on to live for another three years, this was a death sentence. Allēna had to watch her brilliant father, one of the only people who had ever made her feel understood,
Allēna practically gave up on everything. Xavier was everything to her by that point. She describes the last few years of Xavier’s life as being trapped beneath a sword that is held by a fraying rope. At any moment, that rope could snap, and the sword would fall and impale her.
Suffering Alone And In Pain
Hera became colder the worse Xavier got and the worse Allēna fell into her depression. Without Xavier as a buffer anymore, Hera emotionally, mentally, medically, and occasionally physically abused Allēna. Hera began to massively overmedicate her with psychiatric medication so that she wouldn’t fight back anymore. She used Xavier’s worsening condition as a justification to do the bare minimum and emotionally abandon her when she needed support most.
So for three years, Allēna watched her father wither away, unable to tell anyone about what she was suffering at home. Hera explicitly forbade it and would hurt her worse if she tried. She dealt with a terrible bout of mononucleosis in early 2014, as well.
During that ordeal, she had to diagnose and treat herself for it. It turned out that she had actually gone to the doctor too early. The tests she’d gotten came back with a false negative. It was only when she presented with acute pancreatitis a few months later that they actually found the antibodies in her system that indicated she had had mono at all. By that time, Hera had written her now chronic exhaustion and pain as hypochondria, mental illness, and a ploy for attention.
We still haven’t recovered and are still chasing diagnoses a decade later. We suspect that the bout of mono may have given us lupus, an immensely painful and debilitating chronic illness that is notoriously difficult to diagnose. However, both Hera and later Fang wrote Allēna off as a lazy hypochondriac who just didn’t want to do her work, abandoning her to suffer alone, terrified, and in unimaginable physical and psychological pain.
Like The Sun Itself Went Out
Hera’s abuse and Xavier’s impending death psychologically shattered an already fragile Allēna. When he passed away on February 5, 2016, she felt nothing for five days. It hit her at breakfast back at college on the fifth day.
She describes losing Xavier like it was as though the sun itself went out. Her world became dark, cold, and completely and totally lonely. It took every ounce of strength she had just to drag herself to class and back. She told her professors what was going on, and most of them took mercy on her. She could communicate with her Ancient Greek professor that she was having a very hard time that day with just her eyes. This professor, who we’ll call Ms. Melitta, was a very kind and perceptive angel of a woman, and she outright pleaded with Allēna to go easy on herself. She told Allēna she was proud of her just for showing up even when in her words it looked like she “wanted to be blotted off the face of the Earth”.
Allēna, whose family and life up to that point had always pushed her past her capacity to handle it against her will, had never received that kind of grace before. She broke down ugly crying. It was a balm to her weary, brokenhearted soul. She credits Ms. Melitta and others that year for saving her life. She was seriously contemplating suicide at that point, was sick all the time, barely eating, and was an all around disaster. It’s a miracle in her mind that she still has friends from that college, she was such a disaster.
I Will Not Die Here
At the end of the year, when her professors all gathered to give her her closing remarks, they almost all agreed that they admired that she almost always showed up to class, even if she couldn’t manage to stay the whole time or say or do much at all. Even during one of the most painful times in her life, Allēna kept showing up and putting in an effort through tremendous difficulty, and many of them held her in high regard for that. She had never received that sort of kindness and praise before, and it helped her keep going and not give up.
Showing up became a pattern for all of us. We joke that we “appear under mysterious circumstances”. If we say we’ll be someplace at some time, we will be there and early, come hell or high water. Xavier taught us that nothing less will do. Eight did this when he got his job in Philly – he said he would be there in Philly on Monday the Friday before that in Texas, and there the fuck he was on Philly on Monday, early. Nobody in the office thought he’d even show up, considering he’d have to travel over a thousand miles and move in less than a week to take this job. But that’s the way we were raised, and that’s what we do, obstacles be fucking damned.
We will not die here, we keep saying. We have shit to do. And die we don’t, even though there are often close calls.
Stay tuned for more magic and for Part 4! I’m gonna go to sleep soon, I cried my eyes out writing this.
Love, Kalla
One more thing…
Wait! Before you go, we’ve been WebFingered (haha, gottem) and we’ve joined the Fediverse. We’re opensorceryy@opensorceryy.co everywhere that’s federated. Give us a follow?
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“Guernica” Part 2: Allēna Declares War
Hello, everyone! My name is Ellie. As you may have read, I am one of the super-admins our this disaster system. I am still sick, so this post may read as incredibly sleep deprived. Or loopy, take your pick. In any case, I am going to pick up where Eight left off and discuss Allēna’s harrowing “Guernica” Part 2. If you missed yesterday’s post and you’re looking for that, it’s right here. And as always, the poem in full is part of our second poetry collection, Singing Molten Gold To The Morning.
This section is a kick in the soul. I’m just going to be honest, we couldn’t read it aloud for years without crying. It made for some very odd performances. Allēna makes some very powerful declarations here and in many ways foreshadowed Eight’s Operation: Dead Hand. Both Eight and Allēna wanted to get away from Hera. However, it wasn’t until Dead Hand was complete that we completely broke away from her, and we haven’t had contact with her for the past year, thank the gods. However, she does directly tap into her rage here for one of the first times in her life, and the results are something else.
In order to best show you these results, I think Eight’s approach yesterday was excellent, so I’m going to continue doing things his way. First, I’m going to show you a video of Eight performing “Guernica”, Part 2. Next, I’ll write the text of the poem out for you. Then, I’ll analyze it for you. Without further ado, let’s do this thing!
“Guernica” Part 2
Eight’s performance of “Guernica” Part 2. The Poem’s Text
“Guernica” Part 2
thresholds are for brides
and i was a bride once
but that was a moment and
i wore a dress as red as blood
people asked why i did that
i know why i did that now
i didn’t know how else to say i was angry
when my mind was taped shut and i was
kept in a fog
damn those pills!
damn the nightmares!
damn that house that should have caught fire
with all inside!
i am not the crazy child kept in the attic!
not anymore
i am the human unchained,
i am the one that walks free!
i have doors now
i have miles in my pockets
i can and will lock you out.
and there’s blood on their hands
they kicked a child
they should have loved the child
but when they dropped the bombs
the empty house of my mind caved in.
but the structure is stronger than that
i am stronger than that
and this is me calling it what it is….
you make your own hell,
i say to the bombers
i say to the horrors that i experienced
some people see battlefields
i have seen a mind turned inside out
i have been trapped in my own body
i have seen my innocence die before me
and i’ve shouted into the hole of loss
and i’m still hearing the infinite echo.
i don’t know which is worse.
you make your own hell,
i say to the demons i fight
your hell is not mine,
your chains are not mine,
i am not your wall to punch.
i’m not a pewter cup to drink from and laugh with
your hell is not mine
not anymore.
this is me calling what it is…
hell.
and i enter it on my own terms.
not yours,
not anymore.
Allēna in her wedding dress red as blood, as mentioned in “Guernica” Part 2 For Context, Allēna Is A Born Anticonventionalist
Practically from birth, Allēna was a fighter who was determined to fight convention and expectations that were placed on her without her consent. She hated the fact that women had very little power in the church she joined when she was 14 after very thorough research (she is a Byzantinist and avid scholar of early Christian history, after all).
So she charmed all of the men in power so thoroughly that I’m convinced they might have let her get away with anything she wanted to so long as she could explain well enough why she had done it. She charmed damn near everyone else in multiple congregations, as well, so much so that many people cities away would go to her if they needed anything.
The Mormon Social Nexus
Everything and everyone passed through her. Eventually she knew hundreds of people in five to ten states who would go to bat for her if she needed them to. All while committing what would be for most people in the Mormon Church tantamount to social suicide. But it wasn’t, not for her. She had hundreds of people in her pocket. And it wasn’t like she was using them, she genuinely loved them and many of them still love her, despite her now openly being a Pagan gremlin.
“Guernica” Part 2’s Seeds
Her wedding to her first husband, Fang, was no different. They were married in late 2018, and Xavier, our father, had been dead from an aggressive brain tumor for nearly two years at the time of the ceremony. In that time, Hera had completely lost it and had gotten tired of Allēna’s fiery nature and had subjected her to severe mental and emotional abuse and medical neglect. We aptly compare it to a DIY version of the now-declassified CIA experiment MKUltra in order to make us more compliant, easily suggestible, and weak. It very nearly worked. Fortunately, we are all very stubborn and have a very resilient brain.
The pills Allēna mentioned in the poem were prescribed for bipolar I, which we didn’t even have. We were autistic, plural, and extremely traumatized. We later learned that we were on the highest dose of one of those meds that our excellent psychiatrist in Alaska had ever seen, and she’d been practicing at that point for longer than we’d been alive. Allēna, completely gutted by losing Xavier, and seeing no hope in living, fell into a deep suicidal depression, which she met Fang in the big fucking middle of.
Rush Job
She saw herself attempting suicide within the year if she stayed in Texas, Hera was hurting her so badly, and her fate in Alaska with Fang would be unknown, but at least she wouldn’t have to stay in Texas anymore. Allēna and Fang wanted to eventually marry, but not immediately, setting a wedding date of April 8, 2024 once they were engaged. However, Hera didn’t want us living in sin, so she threatened to cut off our lifesaving health insurance if we went to live with Fang unmarried. So, medicated into a fog and pushed into a marriage she was unsure if she even wanted yet, yet still mad as fucking hell, she settled for her favorite skillset, one she knew would drive everyone up the fucking wall – malicious compliance and bucking the hell out of convention.
A Dress As Red As Blood
The wedding came together in three months, during which time Hera and Allēna had an explosive argument in which Hera spat “you’ll be someone else’s problem in three months, anyway”, which inspired Allēna’s iconic folk-punk song “Someone Else’s Problem”. The result was a dark, almost cowgoth ceremony that Allēna dictated down to the last detail on a shoestring budget, since Hera had spent all but forty thousand of the millions of dollars she’d inherited upon Xavier’s death. Allēna and Fang were married beneath an Osage orange tree per her orders, a nod to Xavier, who had taught her all about them.
Like the Osage orange tree, which we affectionately call the “offensive tree of the forest” for its stubborn nature and tendency to drop things on people who are beneath them at random, Allēna would not be moved and blindsided the guests with a few bold choices – a bright red wedding dress, the song she walked down the aisle to, and the song that she and Fang left after the ceremony to, though that was more her brother Blue’s choice. She walked down the aisle to “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky, a band from Texas like her, and the newlyweds walked out to “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash. Blue was the emcee, and he did a damn good job. That dress would later appear in “Guernica” Part 2.
“Guernica” Part 2 As A Declaration of War
Once she moved to Alaska, she was able to process more of what Hera had done to her and how fucked her childhood actually was. She reasoned that she should have every right to be angry, Hera had hurt and betrayed her repeatedly, violated her autonomy, and tried to neglect and abuse her into a blank slate that she could finally reshape in her own image.
Hera and a large part of her family had destroyed any chance she had ever had at normalcy beyond what the stroke did to her. She wanted her innocence back. It was time to reclaim what was hers. Her voice, her power, her fucking birthright. So by the old gods, she was gonna fucking claim it. She boldly asserts herself and her autonomy with that iron will of hers,
“I am the human unchained. I am the one who walks free. I have doors now. I can and will lock you out.”
The “doors” line and the next few lines are significant. She was quite literally kept in an attic from 2017 until she married Fang The entrance to her sleeping space – I can hardly call it a bedroom – was merely a staircase that opened up to the rest of a very open-concept house. Allēna didn’t even have a bed. She had to sleep on a window seat. Hera wouldn’t allow her to do anything to make the space more private or even more personal. Blue had a room, however. He had a private bathroom – that Allēna had to use – and had all the autonomy and freedom he wanted. He didn’t even have a curfew, and Allēna did.
I Have Doors Now
When she got to Alaska, she fought Fang for a space of her own and won. The showdown occurred in the summer of 2019, around the time she wrote “Guernica”. This was fierce argument in which he threatened to take away her health insurance if she didn’t stand down. He was taking a leaf out of Hera’s playbook, and she was pissed and terrified. Fortunately, her friend told her to call his bluff and see what happened. He was indeed bluffing, and now Allēna had an office of her own. This was a profound relief. She could finally be herself in her own space and have a measure of her own life now. To me, that shows in the poem. Now, for what must have been the first time ever, she could enter hell on her own terms, if she chose to at all.
She cut Hera off for a time around the time she started writing “Guernica”, and this was a profound relief. Finally, freedom was within her grasp. All that was left to do then was to heal the damage that had all of Hera’s bullshit had done.
She also cut off most of Hera’s family, and this was a scandal for them. This is why I sort of subtitled this post “Allēna Declares War”. It ignited a powder keg of bullshit the family still wasn’t over by the time Peri left Fang in 2020. The first time Allēna cut off contact was such a big fucking stink for them and so out of the ordinary that it pushed Eight into creating and completing Dead Hand. Heaven forbid people have boundaries and autonomy! My gods, the world is going to shit!
Final Thoughts on “Guernica” Part 2
How’s that for a kick to the damn soul? “Guernica” Part 2 always hurts me so good. I love it when people actually dig deep and be real with the world. Pretense sucks. Anyone can put on a mask and play a role, that’s easy. It takes true strength to be honest and open with the world about your story, and those are the people I admire. I really think Allēna opens herself up to the world here, and in my opinion, that’s true beauty. That is good poetry.
What do y’all think? The comments are yours as long as you be kind. And as always, stay tuned for more magic – and “Guernica” Part 3!
-Ellie Ulvaard, Your Faithful, if Sleepy, Super-Admin
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