Unwarranted Advice for my Sister by grace mcgrade


1. Never underestimate the magic of being kind. Bring unconditional love to every person you meet. They are a faction of you. Some days, you may not know it- and they probably won’t- but be kind to them. Anything you see that you don’t like within others needs to be loved within yourself. The easiest solution for any issue is to throw love at it.

2.  Your thoughts are arrows that trail ahead of you, contstructing reality. Think with intention.

3. Your language creates reality too. Speak with intention.

4.  Spend at least two hours a day outside. Your body needs light photons. You need to sweat. This is what our ancestors did. This is how you embody the changes our consciousness is experiencing. Do it. 

5.  If you don’t feel beautiful, go somewhere that is beautiful. You are that. It all belongs to you and it belongs to no one. You can live forever. Try and catch the sunset every day.

6. Girls like you have a clear channel to God. We need to be in constant calibration and communication with that channel. Things that enhance that channel-  presence, dance, solitude, nature, laughter, rest, play, ritual. Things that diminish channel- technology, codependency, shitty food, shitty people, substance abuse, t.v, news.

7. Men are looking for God. They will be drawn to you. They will want to play out their inner God dilemma with you.  Do not confuse a mans battle with God a reflection of your worth. You are highly awake. This will intimidate people who run from themselves.

8. Everyone is projecting. Most of the time. NEVER fuck with anyone who comes into your energy field to make critiques or attack you. Those are energy vampires. In the same vein- no one else is responsible for your emotions and how you deal with them. Only you.

9. You cocreate reality with whoever you keep in your close corner. If someone doesnt believe in your potential, don’t expect miracles. Only surround yourself with people who believe in magic. Keep the aquarium clean. 

10. Try and keep track of your dreams. 

11. Don’t have sex with someone you don’t want to swap consciousness with.

12. Drop any narratives about anger being wrong. Anger converts energy. Anger gets shit done. Angry women are still beautiful.

13. Drop any narratives about appearing crazy. Inevitably, you will be called crazy. It is unavoidable for awake women. The more intuitive you feel, the more likely your “crazy girl” programming will start to kick in. Dump it in a field somewhere. You are unconsciousness becoming consciousness. You carry the collective with you in your heart.

14. You are descended from warriors of the Irish Otherworld. You can visit them in your imagination, in a forest or a liminal space between land and sea. They are rooting for you. You are a descendant of the fae. You have millions of secret helpers.

15. It is not popular to follow feelings over logic. Always do this. No matter what. Your feelings are flags. If you are in love, be in love. If you are heartbroken, let it encompass you. The more you feel the less you have to repeat the same lessons over again.

16. People who worry about being cool are never cool.

17. You are beautiful. You are the kind of ethereal, magnetic beauty that frightens others. This will bring you blessings and simultaneously make people strangely erratic.

18. Don’t become preoccupied with your appearance. That’s a trap. They dressed you like this in this lifetime so people will listen to what you have to say. This is your clever halloween costume.Become preoccupied with your message. 

19. Never curtail your appetite for mischief and absurdity. It is vital medicine. 

20. Clean your fucking room. It’s an immediate reflection of your inner state. I love you, but clean it. You will feel better. Holy spaces are wherever you rest.

21. Your job is to reparent yourself out of guilt and out of shame. You deserve reminders that you won’t abandon yourself. Resolve self judgement. This is a lifelong assignment. You are the only person who has to live with yourself forever. Your inner dialogue is the projector of all reality. Be generous to yourself. Be unrelentingly forgiving and loving to yourself.

22. You will get heartbroken- it is inevitable, it is the fertile soil from which character blooms. The people who break your heart usually agree to from a plane above time. Forgive them and figure out what they are showing you within yourself. Write.

23. Evade holding on to people who carry outdated perceptions of you. You will take on so many identities in this lifetime. If you hold a space in your life and fall in love with solitude, you will always meet people who are vibrating with you. People like us exist and we always find each other.

24. You can speak without words.

25. Glide through life with the secret belief that the world is conspiring to assist you.

26. Self pity is just lazy storytelling.

27. Multiple truths can exist at once. Pick the ones that are kaleidoscopic.





















Pisces by grace mcgrade

We are all trying to disguise various forms of etheric heartache. Always running from one love into another, in some varying amalgamation of a wound from god. A private agony, shared by everyone. For some, it is obvious, for others- this strange void is concealed. We are all looking for those that groove into our god wound, recycling our sensitivity. Reenacting the etheric heartache.  In our separateness, we weave tales of interpersonal complexes- a hostage to this spiritual wound.



Nature is the epicenter of all circulating psychic energy. It will treat your nostalgia for God. You have to get outside for at least two hours a day. Basque in cathedrals of light. Dump off emotional baggage in rural pastures. Travel by foot, become a spectator to fruitful, varied landscapes. Trudge barefoot through heavy skirts of earth. Speak to mountains, speak to mountains and listen. Nature replies, and hits you with somatic octaves of sound and color you may not fully comprehend. Let the arms of trees pluck off your psychic irritants, absorb the aromas of those that have stained you, stuck to you, without ever asking permission. 

Propel yourself into the wild, and absorb it’s natural beauty. They will stick to your cells. You visit these spaces, and they are beautiful, and because they are beautiful- you will stay that way too. You are made of the same stuff. 

Do away with the garments of conventionality and respectability. Reconvene with your wild.




I want to stretch myself across America, basque in the mundanity of a westbound highway.  Drink big gulps and gloat in the midnumbing normalcy. Speak to hanging trees and seduce strangers. Wear flashy clothes. Get rid of the old feelings. Dump off my attachments in a casket in Texas. Watch the desert while away beneath the shade of each horizon. Cloak myself beneath red white and blue fireworks, flags and fastracks. Basque in the culture of the cultureless, revel in the glory of this prophetic monstrosity one last time, before this entire empire goes caput.



Psychics Need Psychics by grace mcgrade

There is an invisible chain in the sky that draws people together, and we are led by kismet thread that expands beyond the farthest reaches of space, commanded by a silent super intelligence. I feel as though I am watching time, as it curves and contours each passing moment- for that quantum nudge back into some animal, holy bond, designed long before this hologram was erected. 

What is it? Connectivity. Karmic. A Mythical Stain. A virus that is nonsensical, altering preposterously. 

Your ghost has nestled deep somewhere,silently, discreetly.  Beyond the marble walls, moat-like borders and recesses of doubt, oblivion and apathy. Past miles of coding, strands of programming, wound right through my skin like a delicate insect. Etched and inched it’s way through sheets of misanthropy. Somehow, you got in. You have settled, sedimented and infected an echelon of my soul

I didn’t 

Even

Know

Had.

And somewhere, there, in this newly found chasm of soul, I feel myself, and I feel you. You are televised through invisible rooms, silently dancing on unstable plates- a vault of heaven, a chamber of hell. You seep out of me in uncontained moments that humiliate me. Shock me. Like a symbolic cadence, a language I forgot I could speak.

I feel you inside of me like a silent demolition. Uncomfortable, and resounding. You shot through my reality like a bullet. I have been detonated, assembled and disassembled. I have tried on a million perspectives about you. You are seismic and simultaneously non existent. Mechanically frequent, like a cosmic time bomb, terrifyingly starved of divine course.

Who builds a fire just to asphyxiate it?



Culmination by grace mcgrade

You build your own dimension, tape symbols to all four of your walls- of omens, stars, roses, the celestial bodies and their most intricate pathways. You build your own dimension, seal it, proclaim it- in hope that you can shut out the demolition of the planet. Or rather, invoke it.

You feel like you owe yourself some reprieve, that these four walls have seen enough, heard enough. Something in the determined, enthusiastic cadence of your voice, your animated commitment to self assurity, you could convince anyone of anything. So you pick leisure, let your music spill around and take on the appearance of something half feral. You decide that you belong in your own arms before anyone else. Your love is the greatest. That most people bore you. You take deep breaths. Surrendering to half spent daydreams. Looking for the thread in your emotionality that connects your body to your soul.

January feels like culmination. Insisting.

The World is Ending by grace mcgrade

I grew up in a housing estate in London, “The World’s End Estate”, the roughest building in Chelsea. Chelsea was known as the stomping ground for London’s high society, renowned for its carefully manicured streets and it’s elite inhabitants, gracefully overlooking the River Thames. It’s decadent pearly townhouses housed all of the debutants and duchesses, the socialites and their most eligible royal suitors. The Kings Road, appropriately named, was the King's favorite street. Dotted neatly with artisan cheese shops, chocolate confectioneries and boutique designer stores, each boasting glittering and immaculately rendered displays.

And then there was the World’s End estate. A towering, brown monstrosity, smack dab in the middle, just off the Kings Road. Massive industrial brick buildings, hovering over the neat boutique stories like the fucking death star. Looming over the pretty people like a comedic glyph of class imbalance. The Worlds End Estate was guarded by cycling chavs in Adidas sweatsuits and their rabid Pitbulls, bellowing the occasional “Awright Luhv?” and it was a good month if there wasn’t a stabbing. You had to triple lock your bikes and avoid walking through poorly lit areas. A great place to be a thief. The elevators, fragrant with the aromatic notes of fish’n’chips and piss. I was too young to be alarmed by any of this. It was home. I didn’t care. I had Winnie the Pooh bedding. I could get six sour gum balls for 25p from the lady with the grumpy face at the newsagents store. 

By the time I learned to read, I realized everything around me said “World’s End”. Despite me living in the “World’s End Estate”, there was the “World’s End Bookstore”, the “World’s End Cafe” and the Vivienne Westwood flagshop, marked by a giant spinning clock counting down to the World's End. This confused my child brain. I oscillated from thinking that the world was indeed, coming to an end, and all of these stores and buildings had decided to let me know through their advertisements and signs- or that we were at the edge of the planet, the corner of earth. 

My mother was a posh aristocratic artist, who had fallen in love with a working class Scottsman because he made her laugh. My dad was the son of a construction worker, who had escaped Glasgow to become a writer. Instead, he was teaching English to high school kids. My Dad would poke fun at my mothers posh voice, her eccentric wealthy parents, and sing her Common People by Pulp.

I must have been about 7 or 8 when I began to pick up on class conscientiousness, I realized people would perk up when I told them I lived in Chelsea, but wince and cower when I told them I lived in the World’s End Estate. My friends, in their shiny, pastel Kensington townhouses- were too afraid to come over. On one particular daily ascent in the piss drenched elevator of the World’s End Estate, I brought my observations to my Dad’s attention. He took a deep breath, and then crouched down to me so he was eye level, and whispered. “Listen, I know you have been told that your mothers side of the family are the wealthy ones- but who cares about that.  I’ll have you know- my family are descendants of the High Kings of Ireland. So we are royal blood. You can’t tell anyone though. And the High Kings of Ireland, they weren’t like silly English kings. They were warriors, our people. Magic. Don’t forget that. And don’t tell anyone.”  

He was lying, of course. But I believed him then. I had a skip in my step the next time we would go for one of our walks down the King Road together, his hands like big warm saucers, one of his giant steps equating to six of mine. In my mind I was a descendant of the High Kings of Ireland. And the only two people who knew, were me and him. 

 I believed him then, and I think for several years afterwards. The belief probably sat and sedimented in some fold of subconscious that informs my present behavior. So did all the signs that said, “World’s End”.



Hermit Phase by grace mcgrade

The sun is transiting through the final degrees of my 12th house, the sector of isolation, the dreamspace, the shared collective subconscious. Once a year I get to reacquaint myself with this strange void, and surrender my excess emotional material. I have psychic fatigue. I feel displaced, like I have a phantom limb in some otherworld. Like I need to locate a lost part of myself. Light has been moving differently, orbiting people and plants in a cloak of otherworldly ether. Neon purple and electric blue. It’s beautiful, but a solitary beauty- almost impossible to articulate, yet so immaculate that it begs to be shared. My world has been like that lately. Pocketed miracles with no witnesses. 


I want to blast myself apart, and prang open a year's worth of wounds, unfurl the rancid twisty thoughts that have clouded my perception.

Thats what wounds are.
They are perceptive distortions.

Perceptive distortions that create. And create. Sometimes entire circumstances, people, timelines.


 I want to give up on being perceived by anyone, and simultaneously I want to be told that I am beautiful. 

I pin angel wings to my wall, steal flowers from neighbors and keep them in a box around my bed. Rummage through boxes of notes, dream diaries and photographs from ex’s. In my dreams I am trying to make a puzzle out of bark in a redwood forest. Running barefoot. Following hawks. 

I vow to dispel grief, swear off heartache.

Become sterner, smarter, colder.

I can’t.



Coyote by grace mcgrade


I should probably tell you at this point that I don’t write  in chronological order. And none of it will be about you. I have never written about a man, ever. 

We got off to a promising start. You took hikes the same distance as mine, about five miles, on different sides of town. I thought that was funny. Like we were casting circles, leaving our thoughts to dance behind us, a trail of ephemeral entities that get taken with the fairies. Like we needed somewhere to stomp out the confusion. 

You hated covid because we couldn’t go to coffee shops, the museums and the restaurants, your local haunts where you could draw musical inspiration from. You said you wanted things to go back to normal. 

To normal. That irritated me. I thought covid was delightful; absurd and entertaining. I enjoyed the craftiness of it, the sneaking around, meeting up on fields, caves and beaches. Driving Mulholland drinking rose in camelbacks, the primitive intensity of apocalypse dating. Looking for men who could build fires and shoplift. 

But you were funny, sharp, quick-witted. Stylish and attractive, but in a hyper conscientious way. Awkward and honest in a valuable way. 


You showed me your hike and I showed you mine. Yours wound a loop through the hills of highland park, culminating in an impossible pond, dusted with lichen and moss. You told me you were followed by coyotes regularly, and you didn’t know what that meant. When I didn’t have sneakers you spent an hour looking for someone with the same shoe size as mine. Later you would send me a song about that moment, and I appreciated that. I didn’t tell you then, but I appreciated it. It was one of your finer moments.

We had sex with a plastic jesus hanging over us, in a Christmas themed hotel room. I joked that if you couldn’t build me a fort out of blankets, I would never date you again. You couldn’t build the fort, and you also didn’t realize I was joking. If we had stayed together longer, perhaps we would have fallen in love, or perhaps I would have started to hate you. It was better this way. 

Maybe I needed a gestation of normalcy, and you needed an existential shake up. It was a vacation of poles.



* by grace mcgrade




I am sitting perched poolside in a cul-de-sac in Laurel Canyon, as palm trees fan out casting strange shadows. Our backdrop, a sickly  flamingo pink sky. This house could be a dollhouse, part of a “Hollywood in Miniature” set.  Something feels mighty unnatural about this December afternoon. The cocktails have too much sugar and our only auditory accompaniment is the irritatingly timeless omissions of a white guy on acoustic. 


I am being eyed by a dude that talks to me like he's pitching jokes in a writers room, and yapped at by a bleach blonde who sounds like he's confessing sins in a rehab. I am bored of men sharing “thoughts” and “opinions”. Enough of that useless shite. Look, you sullen man-girl, you silly bitch boy, look at the cosmodemonic doomsday phallus being shot our way. Unless you're mocking the institutions, don’t comment on them. Shut the fuck up and start building us compounds. 


Or sit in a circle and butt chug fluoride, sing a song on acoustic, perform a ritualistic circle jerk to Em-rata. Pick a team. and stick to it. 


Times like these I want to slink off to some remote corner of the earth with talking trees and ferns that let me tune into their ever-singing transmissions.  Swear it all off. Everyone is craving the quickest, most efficient of transactions. We are corporations of individual identity, trying to sell ourselves. Trying to sell ourselves to each other in subtle ways. Carefully refining our likeability, relatability, compatibility. 


My product is very disorganized. I am a messy symphony of the vulgar and refined, the spiritual and superficial, the present yet delightfully inebriated. Pick me! I am an articulate supergirl with a messiah complex. 


If you were here, we would make fun of this together. We would sit, elbow to elbow, wondering if we were becoming too soft. We love it, we hate it. The parties that take five freeways to get to, the pretense, the silly urgency to make fun happen.  


But you're not here, and you did get soft. I hear you're expecting a kid.