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The Day Laborer and The Palm Reader

from Kill Starlings by Christian Drake

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lyrics

The sign at the strip mall nail parlor & botánica said,
Free cup of coffee with every palm reading,
so the day laborer dismounting the truck bed across the street,
wearing the cologne of grease and vaporized grass
the way the devil wears sulfur,
decided to find out his fortune.

The palm reader wore pink sweatpants beneath her gypsy skirts.
There were pictures of two children tacked on the corkboard
next to some tarot cards. She turned up his right hand in hers
and frowned. The whorls were gone,
fingerprints burned off and anonymous. The topography of a life,
all sanded down by an ocean of work. All that remained
in the callused hoof of his palm was a life line
that frayed like weak lightning and then disappeared.
She squinted like an astronomer into a cloudy sky,
and said, I'm sorry, I have to give you a refund.
You have no future.

He said, Puede todavía tengo la taza de café?

She said, Yes, you can still have the cup of coffee.

Sipping his coffee from a styrofoam cup, he said,
Maybe you can read the future. But I
can do something more useful: I can read the past.
Look again. See this range of calluses
below my fingers? This is my shovel line.
This scar on the heel, I got pushing an old car out of a ditch.
My fingerprints were scalded off by the poison
they spray to make tomatoes perfect.
On the index, the mark of rope-burn.
The middle, from guitar strings.
The ring finger, caught in a belt sander.
The pinky is somewhere in Guatemala - I'd rather not tell the story.
These are the stars I have placed in the sky of my own fortune,
one by one, as if putting oranges back on the trees.
Maybe I have erased my destiny, but if you can read my scars
scattered like tea leaves in the cup of my open palms,
you can tell what sort of man I am,
and can become.

That night, as he was unwrapping her quilted gypsy skirts,
her K-mart bra, precisely undoing the tiny gold clasp
of her necklace with his glove-like hands,
she would show him the twilight of her body: the scar
under her lip where the toy fire truck was thrown. The black vein
like a tattooed river on her thigh. The ironing burn,
the cigarette burn on her wrist like a kissing mouth, the c-section.
Her body was like the sky, and her marks
a Cassiopeia in the shape of her hard life, and all the dog bites
and bruises laughed with her as they were revealed,
as she matched the map of her scars to his,
scars that for working people are always birthmarks,
and they made love until they both knew each other in a past life,
their bodies together a busy storyteller,
they made love until they became an augury in the mirror
and a prediction that has already come true:
his body, an open hand on the bed.
Her lips, an oracle talking in her sleep.

credits

from Kill Starlings, track released January 26, 2012

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Christian Drake Dhaka Division, Bangladesh

Christian Drake is a six-time National Poetry Slam team member and has performed on three National Poetry Slam Finals stages. Originally from New England, he bas been a host of popular slams, poetry shows and burlesques in San Francisco, CA and Albuquerque, NM. He's best known for his often loud, erotic, and political nature poetry. He currently a science teacher in the New England wilderness. ... more

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