Not to be all binary, but there is right- and left-handed magic. DNA is a double-helix structure. When I think of genetics, I think of collisions. I think about shared molecules. Once, I lived inside both my mother and grandmother. There was a nine-month period where we made up a perfect matriarchal trinity, a blood coven. Thrice to thine and thrice to mine. I think about how we all just keep trading the same recycled star stuff, passing around rungs of our deoxyribonucleic Jacob’s ladders. So many of the stars we see are dead. I can feel my cells dying inside right now. So many pieces of me come from dead things. Supernovas beget new stars. I’m afraid I’m a bad Xerox, streaks in my margins. The law of conservation of matter demands balance. As the human population keeps metastasizing, I wonder where all these souls are coming from. Are we moving farther away from the stars?

On my mother’s side, my great-great grandmother worked her way to Los Estados, fleeing disease and death and revolution. She told fortunes with a hand-painted Tarot deck. They say your first Tarot deck should always be a gift. I don’t know if it was her first deck. I don’t know if she painted it herself. I like to think she did. My first deck was a gift. I thought learning the arcana would come naturally to me. It had to. It was in my blood. I read book after book and couldn’t get it. Then one night, I dreamt of an old woman who handed me a pair of gold coins. Maybe she was my great-great grandmother, or maybe she was The Grandmother, Coatlicue, mother to the moon and the stars. She must have blessed me, because when I awoke the next morning, I found I could read the cards. The two of coins is about juggling responsibilities. What responsibilities had this old woman just handed me? My cards foretold a death. The dead woman and I cried together. She was gone less than a month later. I’ve hardly touched my deck since. Two coins. Two sides to a coin. Not to be all binary, but life and death, and sleepwalking between those worlds. I dreamt my uncle gave me a check to cash. The bank teller was a dead man. He passed me gold coins through the window and said, Tell your uncle, I’ll be seeing him. A month later, my uncle cashed out. Somewhere, a ledger is balanced. I take out my Tarot deck and draw the Star. It’s a woman with two urns. Water and earth. The healer and the guide. But the healer-guide is probably already dead. Self-inflicted supernova.

I don’t know my father’s people well enough, but I know they drank like they had things to forget. Every single one of them was or is consumed with some kind of art. My grandfather who was born in Germany, whose first language was German, was a tail gunner in World War II, shooting Germans. Something about the son killing the fatherland. He must have been ashamed of being an immigrant. I didn’t know he was one until after he died. I never knew his first language wasn’t English. He was also a painter. Towards the end of his life, he began to paint angels and stars against cobalt skies, like a Chagall window. He could already see Jacob’s ladder descending. My uncle was also a painter. He died before I was born. One of his paintings hung in the hallway outside my bedroom. It was of W.C. Fields, star of stage and screen. Fields started out in vaudeville. He became the world’s greatest juggler. He said death is a duty. His epitaph was, I’d rather be in Philly. I bet he could juggle two coins, no problem. But the portrait my uncle made of him was cursed. Everyone who saw it was unnerved. I always wondered what my uncle conjured with his paintbrush and what the price was. My uncle who died so young. Car accident. Collision. After my parents divorced, I don’t know what became of that painting. It could be haunting somebody else’s wall right now. Not to be all binary, but married and divorced, presence and absence, here and gone. My aunt waxes and paints pysanka eggs. I assume the tradition was handed down from our Slavic forebears. Pysanka means “to write.” They say the fate of the world lies with these eggs and thus with the egg scribes. So long as we write on eggs, the world will go on. When we stop writing on eggs, a great serpent will take over. Writing on eggs is a delicate business. The egg is a symbol of resurrection. Some people wish so hard for the dead to come back. I don’t know how to tell them, they’re already here. 

My father’s people came from Germany and Yugoslavia to Ohio, and from there, to Missouri. My mother’s people came from Mexico to Missouri. Collisions. Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite, and furthermore, always carry a small snake. My Aztec ancestors were worshipping Coatlicue, she of the snake skirts, patron saint of women who die in childbirth. My great-great grandmother would perform egg limpias. She used finely ground eggshells for her rituals and sacrificed chickens. For all I know, we had ancestors in Ohio, building mounds shaped like serpents swallowing eggs, tracking the solstices. So many of those massive earthworks and stone temples are astrological charts. Earth and sky. As above, so below. I wonder if they had a dual purpose. I wonder if we were trying to signal someone, like castaways spelling HELP on a beach, like pilots sending out an S.O.S. If there are aliens, I wonder if they’re also made of star stuff. Everyone is related if you go back far enough. For all I know, all of the people in this narrative saw My Little Chickadee with W.C. Fields, and all of them laughed at the same jokes. Maybe that’s why both sides of my family were attracted to this great middle nothing. Neither east nor west, neither north nor south. Never not an immigrant. Never not a sojourner. Like the goddess, our aspects are many. A departure from the binary.

Everyone on Earth is related to the stars. With my left hand, I cleanse my soul with eggs, erasing the streaks from my margins. With my right, I keep writing on eggshells and reconciling accounts. I try to tell myself I am more than an echo. I crack the eggs open and souls fly out faster than I can catch them. Destruction and creation. I wonder how much control a creator has. Cards, paintings, spirits, anything can get lost. I read the gold coin yolks. The contents of the egg may or may not have anything to do with what the egg writer wrote. Shells scatter like supernovas birthing new stars. I wonder what a stillborn star looks like. Somewhere, the serpent sleeps, coiled like a DNA strand. Who knows what lies dormant with it? Scales and nucleotides. Sheddable skin and slow digestion from swallowing things whole. Balance. And the universe goes on. For now.