Poetry: The Fortune Teller by Jessica Fischoff
Jessica Fischoff’s mythic poem leans into divinated romance, star-spoken inevitability. “The Fortune Teller” speaks with few lines, but pulls the wide galactic into the palm, the body. We want the fortune to be real.
The Fortune Teller
Give me your hand, I promise to be
Gentle. Apollo’s in the next room breaking
Mercury free of his retrograde, but I’m here
With you, the walls spread like a palm, shaking
As nervously. Give me your hand. Let me read you
Like graffiti, strip the show down to truth. There is light
Beyond the threshold, significant and pervading,
Saffron burning like a torch between the burrowed
Lines that brought you here. Give me your hand.
Let me take you where the body can no longer
Carry. Nothing hurts that isn’t real.
Jessica Fischoff
Jessica Fischoff is the Editor of [PANK]. Her little book of poems, The Desperate Measure of Undoing will be published in the Fall by Across the Margin and is available for presale at: https://acrossthemargin.com/product/desperate-measure-undoing/
