My parents had a subscription to The Globe & Mail, and as a tween, I would regularly check my horoscope. I’m not sure how much I believed it at the time; perhaps too much, as I tried to convince myself of its veracity and explanation why I was a strange child without many friends; I was a Cancer, and therefore a homebody, like a crab, moving sideways away from people. Except that I wasn’t, and over time, I realized the limitations of such predictions. There are too many factors over which we have no control, too many variables in our lives to think that the alignment of stars and planets at the minute we are born are a template set in stone.
So it took a few glances at the Co—Star app before I paid attention. Yes, it asked for your birthday, location, and time to send its daily words of wisdom and do’s and don’ts. But its odd phrasing and its what felt like more left-field advice was less to do with any adherence to a chart and more to make you think about your life, or a moment in your time, differently. Over the course of several months, I wrote down some of the single-sentences of advice that would pop up on my lock screen, ones that felt like prompts, and wrote a series of poems. Each was phrased as an instruction, or a reminder; a plea, or a compliment. Perhaps that was just my interpretation, so depending on what each would make me think of, the poem would either be in the first or the second person. That second person might be me, or it might be the reader.
Part story, part meditation, part advice column. To myself of the past and the future, to anyone who might take something from it.
Shelagh Rowan-Legg is a writer and filmmaker in Montréal. Her poetry and short stories have been published in numerous journals such as The Windsor Review, The Ampersand Review, and New Poetry. Her chapbook CO—STAR & RESPONSE is newly out from above/ground press. Her short films have screened at festivals around the world, and she is a Contributing Editor at ScreenAnarchy. Find her at shelaghrowanlegg.com and on Bluesky, @shelaghrowanlegg.northsky.social.
