The Page of Pentacles

My wife purchased a set of tarot cards

with lovely flat comfortable art.

Wide bodied women and inarticulate men

clutch cups and wands and swords.

A tower leans anxiously in ink.

We sit on the carpet. I am a high school

teacher; she is a graduate student.

I read her draws—

meditating on past present future.

An Eight of Cups

whispers what she was whispering

in her head before the card was drawn:

eight cups brimming with

the realities of higher education

and the drafty loneliness of

parsing decade-rotten legal pulp

in a dim library.

It’s my turn and I kick my legs out.

I am tall and my knees ache under

my weight.

Alone on a vague brown steppe

the Page of Pentacles lifts a coin high to

a red July sun, itself superimposed on clouds.

The page is genderless,

making a holy sign with their right hand.

Two palm trees lean, like Jonah’s shade,

on the periphery.

Tell me I am a student. The Page of Pentacles

represents the energy of impact

real and on the earth. What Lucifer might have pulled:

the domination, the knowledge of good and not.

I, charged with smelting and blending

spiritus mundi and smearing it over the

eyes of children: nightmorning refugees.

I lift the coin high above my head.

The yellow disc, star carved and presenting

my other hand. Holy. Apart.

Apart from form. Sour bodies mingling

early on weekdays. Sour bodies

held responsible for their everything and their

all at once and their should have thought.

We get off the floor. Stack the cards

back in their cardboard.

Brush our teeth and strip for bed.

Tanner Abernathy teaches high school English in a Seattle suburb. He writes image-centric poetry and fiction and enjoys walking and caring for his cat and rabbits. Tanner's favorite writer is Wendell Berry and often discusses Berry with his grandmother. His poetry has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Jeopardy Magazine, and Washington 129+. He was also a winner of the 2018 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest.