My One Thing -- Most Wanted.

I am here, and I am packing for a trip to Eugene to visit my girlfriend. I will be spending a many-hours-long drive in a truck with the mother of the woman I am going to visit. This sounds both less and more awkward than it actually is. At the moment, I have no idea when I will be coming home, and I have not told this to my roommate.

I am here, and I am packing, and as I am making a pile of things that will and will not go into the pack that I am taking with me, I find that it is no contest that the deck of cards that my ex boyfriend gave me will be going along.

Why?

Because if I take one good thing away from that soured romance, it will have been this deck of cards. I love these cards and I will be damned if a little thing like where they came from will spoil them.

Each card has a dark, 'moody', strange, unsettling, obtuse, fractured, inverse, unwound image superimposed over an artificial background, with a few lines of poetry, unrelated to any of the others in the deck, written in a smudgy typewriter font across the card. These cards are dark and murky. These cards have images of film slides, negatives, photographs, x-rays (one of a tulip), statuary, birds, and dark things.

My favourite card is the five of clubs. A black ink handprint is superimposed over murky green-gray-brown background, and while lettering splashes across the palm.

this yin for vivisection, 

      for a mother-may-I, 

      hayseed seance

These cards make me feel things that I like to feel. They make me feel full, but hollow. They make me feel secret, and, probably most of all, in control.

I will admit, the card showing a pressed tulip backlit through a floodlamp (trust me, it's way better than it sounds) is my second-favourite. It is the three of spades, and mostly a yellow cream colour.


         preparing for the act:

on a bed

        of soft threats,

and a pillow of sorrow.