Cindy’s work is in quotation marks.
Years back she bought a cloudbuster
hoping she could make it rain enough
to flood the basement of her mother
the logomancer’s corporate office.
Some forms of divination you can count on to fail
but tea-leaves will always tell what color hair
the writer had before she killed the lead.
Cindy’s been stirring Darjeeling into water
trying not to drink the boiling stone and checking
the classifieds for the next behind-the-moon
eclipse. She works like an astrologer
in punctuation as I said except she got let off
for stopping after and. Subject position:
breast-pocket. Subject position: behind the curtain.
She bought a brick of salt to tell
the manager his death-day but couldn’t read
Cyrillic. I bought a stave of coal to draw
lots from ashes but I couldn’t talk
to Cindy through the window in the fog.
She contemplates her thralldom in my hand.
Tryster, she draws a moongate in my palm
and steps through it. There are no reasons
for the moon, she says, from beyond.
There are only origins.