Wheel of Fortune
The
inevitable arrives on time,
never when
you’re ready.
The
figures on your carousel
rise and
fall.
Seasons
shimmy into years,
wrinkles
furrow brows, claw eyes,
Fortune is
arbitrary,
a marble
ricochets off the roulette wheel.
I am not
cause and effect,
that
dreaded karma loop.
Your
effort and actions
do not
concern me
any more
than gravity cares for
planets
held in orbit.
I happen
without you.
You happen
in me.
Go up, go
down, move with me
or resist.
Control is illusion.
From my
whirling hub, on spokes of
uncertainty,
chaos, chance,
you will
spin in cycles
on blurs
of silver.
The Tower
You’ve
been told a thousand times:
Castles
without foundations fall.
Flesh
devoid of spirit is dead.
I let you
have at it long enough.
Watched
you betray your best friend,
steal his
wife.
Watched
you squander the inheritance
of your
father’s sweat.
Take
without permission,
take for
granted.
In love
with the avatar
you’ve
jazzed up for yourself,
you never
saw me coming.
I’m the
storm
in your
50th year,
the
lightning strike
market
crash, the affair.
The
pandemic, diagnosis,
the knock
on the door that
alters
your life forever.
I’m the
change you didn’t invite
to the
party, embrace in bed.
The change
necessary, but you refused.
Gave the
power of choice to me.
I’m your
bad behavior come back to you,
your life
in the red.
I’m one
decisive stroke to zero.
The Sun
I am
salacious yellow
spilling
myself across your table,
your face,
after weeklong rain,
winter’s
waste, the darkest nights.
I make you
squint,
wear
shades, but
you look
me in the eye
fall into
my arms, say,
Yes,
yes, yes to my
light,
my
offering, my joy, to the wonder
of childhood
lost, the playground buried,
to
happiness in reprise.
I am peach
juice silking lips, sunflowers
looking
upward, folded wishes reflected
in
rippling water, answered.
The better
day with or without clouds.
I am love
returned, love renewed.
I am the
original you
before
storms and famine
quakes and
floods, nightmares and doubt.
I am you
come home
to you as
light.
Writer’s Block
I don’t
know what to do
when you
submit to her, strip yourself down
to a
miscued hard-on, let her ram it straight into your brain.
I don’t
know how to warn you against the seduction
or the
indolence she induces.
I know she
invented black garters and lace,
is an
expert at choked-up cleavages.
I know
there’s a trick to cracking whips
and coaxing
death before it’s time.
How do I
tell you, better to suffer
the
suffering of muted words?
How can I
ask you to imagine finished pages
or
convince you Penelope waits
while
Circe screws you over?
High on
the Slanted Ceiling
A reflection
shimmers like a tear in satin,
a rip in
the tapestry of Sunday morning ease.
Magnified
molecules and gaseous swirls
of another
landscape find us in the folds of our flesh.
Your lava
silvers my belly, sliding to indigo sheets
crisp by
your making our bed ready for bluer waves.
We carry
low in our bowels. And though your sex rests
thigh-cushioned
and sated, swollen in a ruddy glow,
and I,
drowsy in scents, nestle under your chin,
we are
stirred into the lens with sun and water.
The
helioscope of sensation ends, hearing last, the echo
of an
orgasm, a sigh, we go from fingertips
alone
through the portal.
"Wheel of Fortune,” “The Tower,” “The Sun,” “Writer’s Block,” and “High on a Slanted Ceiling.” The first three poems are from an unpublished new collection that includes 22 persona poems written in the imagined voices of the major arcana of the tarot deck. The other two poems are also from this collection but in a separate section.
Catherine Arra is a former high school English and writing teacher. Since leaving the classroom in 2012, her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous literary journals online and in print, and in several anthologies. She is the author of Deer Love (Dos Madres Press, 2021), Her Landscape, Poems Based on the Life of Mileva Marić Einstein, (Finishing Line Press in July, 2020), (Women in Parentheses) (Kelsay Books, 2019), Writing in the Ether (Dos Madres Press, 2018) and three chapbooks. Arra lives in upstate New York, where she teaches part-time, and facilitates local writing groups. Find her at www.catherinearra.com
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