Day 35 | Having My Cards Read by W. S. Di Piero

Day 61 | Having My Cards Read by W. S. Di Piero

Day 97 | Having My Cards Read by W. S. Di Piero

Day 61 | Having My Cards Read by W. S. Di Piero.

Day 82 | Releasing the Sherpas by Campbell McGrath

Releasing the Sherpas
Campbell McGrath

The last two sherpas were the strongest,

faithful companions, their faces wind-peeled,

streaked with soot and glacier-light on the snowfield

below the summit where we stopped to rest.

The first was my body, snug in its cap of lynx-

fur, smelling of yak butter and fine mineral dirt,

agile, impetuous, broad-shouldered,

alive to the frozen bite of oxygen in the larynx.

The second was my intellect, dour and thirsty,

furrowing its fox-like brow, my calculating brain

searching for some cairn or chasm to explain

my decision to send them back without me.

Looking down from the next, ax-cleft serac

I saw them turn and dwindle and felt unafraid.

Blind as a diamond, sun-pure and rarefied,

whatever I was then, there was no turning back.

Day 84 | Having My Cards Read by W. S. Di Piero

Day 61 | Having My Cards Read by W. S. Di Piero.

Day 61 | Having My Cards Read by W. S. Di Piero

Having My Cards Read
W. S. Di Piero

Hobos wail a garbage can against

the cyclone links. The monkey puzzle tree

droops its scaly tails above our heads

as she sets up near the zoo’s bonobos,

humping happy in their cages close

to chimps ripping off each other’s ears.

And in the cloud reposing on the sky,

cut by an F22’s long hookah puffs,

the cyan atmospherics rupture into

solarized platelets: her Ray-Bans foil

my own face back at me:

                                  A time of renewals

            though somewhere

                         dark cold woe

                                   You won’t know what’s what

Comes a taste of sea to make her pause,

and marine gusts slice and spook her cards, my cards,

that flurry to the sidewalk, near the barred gate,

breaking fortune down faster as she speaks.