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Moon card photo

i.

When the moon card is reversed in the tarot, it means you'll be waiting for a long time to clarify the question you need to ask.

Your question will form like a hydrangea blossom and explode into stars over yawning stretches of grass, where it then will rain down on you like a nightmare of all your childhood teeth.

While you wait, you should make time to slowly dust off the bodies you thought you had buried, but just didn't get around to it, because now they're starting to smell: like coal tar, humidity and salt, caramel vanilla coffees, the inside of your old car.

ii.

Consider this, though: you are also a corpse that I forgot to bury.
You smell like lanolin and warm beer.

Still, you long for the taste of oranges, for sugar cake and milk, for the feeling of winter fires as you lie on your stomach watching television. 

Your life: now, a constant journey to the basement. Morphine intones, your genes can't handle this.

You think you're becoming that rocking horse in your childhood home with its hooves chewed off by an ancient rabbit.

When you walk around in the Virginia air you feel heavy and damp, like there is a shard of glass you forgot to dislodge from your throat and swallow.

The air smells like summer storms: it's probably one of those bodies you forgot to bury.

iii.

I am expressing needs to you: you hold them like interesting rocks, turning them over in your palm before placing them down on the soil, encircling me like a pixie ring.

"It would be great to hear from you." I begin drinking red wine deliberately
and feel the small bird that cries inside of me when you write, dancing on its little feet.

I will become a larger bird, to consume the small one that weeps. I will soar over highways to
catch a glimpse of my old car as someone sits inside listening—

image: Jess Smith


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