The Fortune Teller

By coming here they’ll learn tomorrow’s fate.

Unlike the daily horoscope, mass made,
Whose arrows of prediction often miss,
My aim is not reliant on tea leaves,
Ouija boards, celestial charts, or cards.

Hereditary prescience makes a seer.
I’m an enchantress with go-to-hell eyes,
Level and unfathomable, adept
At curing any indecisiveness.

“Should I divorce him?” “Did she cheat on me?”
“I’m finding windows, fastened at bedtime,
Unlatched when I awake. Is it a ghost?”

My clients know I gaze across beyond,
Tap truth with fingertips, selecting cards,
Revealing their hunch was right all along
About that rich Nigerian’s bequest
Of thirteen million dollars — from a man
They’d never met. A sidewalk psychic could
Hoodwink some easily. Are you naïve,
Believing twelve expensive candles can
Lift curses? Do you fret about bad luck?

Bring me unrecognizable portents,
Ambiguous unravelings, blurred clues.

Yes, you’ll get that fulfilling job, well paid,
Which burns your soul, devours it with rage.

Your daughter’s marriage won’t last. He will cheat.
His mistress kills him. Wealthy widowhood.
Thus cosmic forces will erase her grief.

A river’s long dark silence spits up shorts.
Police come quietly. A missing child’s?

They count on secret sleuthing. I oblige,
Though never named in criminal reports,
Not interviewed on TV. When I scried,
The culprit’s face, described so pens and chalk
Could capture it on paper, got him cuffed.

I felt a sudden current breach my walls,
A stranger’s breath, the blur of certainty
Unchaperoned — like Lazarus unbound.

My second sight, clairvoyancy, detects
Subtext from lives or tongues of the unseen.

LindaAnn LoSchiavo, recently Poetry SuperHighway's Poet of the Week, is a member of SFPA and The Dramatists Guild. Her poetry collections "Conflicted Excitement" [Red Wolf Editions, 2018], "Concupiscent Consumption" [Red Ferret Press, 2020], and Elgin Award nominee "A Route Obscure and Lonely" [Wapshott Press, 2019] along with a contribution in “Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice” [Macmillan in the USA, Aracne Editions in Italy] are her latest titles.

She has won prizes from the new renaissance, Wax Poetry and Arts, and other literary journals and has been nominated for the Elgin Award and the Rhysling Award.

Her VideoPoetry channel — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHm1NZIlTZybLTFA44wwdfg

Find more by LindaAnn LoSchiavo in the Author Index.

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