Irene Cooper
Breakfast Tarot
it seems the stuff of parlor games,
fantasy and velveteen against the cold:
fashion your fortune from vapor
impale your lonely vision on a hatpin
i jump caffeinated to battle,
steel my butter knife for an epic
staged in a William Morris spoon
who will witness this twist of fate?
William Blake! i see you naked
in your garden with your wife,
a dribble of ink on a mottled thigh,
biscuit in your beard like fairy dust
the five of cups is laid:
sepia stain in the linen, set
—Submitted on 3/28/2020
Irene Cooper is the author of the novel Committal, forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in September, 2020. Her poems, reviews, and essays appear in The Feminist Wire, Utterance, VoiceCatcher, The Rumpus, and other journals. She is a freelance copywriter and editor, facilitates creative writing workshops in Central Oregon, and co-edits The Stay Project.
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