Mary Kathryn Jablonski

Missed Fortune*

Doors are opening…
but they are too small for you to enter.

Your luck has been…
lost in the meadows of your childhood.

Maintain a sense of balance…
by letting go.

Your love life…
has been misnamed.

Advice, when most needed…
is usually bullshit.

Simplicity of character…
is not a sin.

You will take a chance…
in your next life.

Trust your intuition…
mistrust everyone else.

The entire sum of existence…
can be found in the language of birdsong.

Harmony and clarity…
are the gifts of poetry.

 

* A half-found poem with words in italics from fortune cookies

 

The kind of bread that’s found in dreams of hunger

It didn’t pay much. Summer stock, you know. She had knocked
on a door. They were rehearsing a play, which took place in
winter. She was to read her part without messing up the grains of
artificial snow, which reminded her of soft-shoe sand. Sure,
she thought, I’ll hover above them like a ghost. They met there
backstage, where another woman told her she was upset about having
to deal with him. Just play it cool, she told her, Rise above it all. In
the green room hours later, he’s asleep when they finish. They pass
through, footsteps soft as snow falling, so as not to wake him.

When they met again in the room beside the train tracks, the white
room, like so many white rooms, and he lay above her and spoke
the words he needed as desperately to say as she to hear — only he
knew again that they were lies. She again believed them. Even so,
this caused them both great pain. The beautiful deception. And the joy.

 

Artist/poet Mary Kathryn Jablonski is most recently author of Sugar Maker Moon, from Dos Madres Press. Her poems and collaborative video/poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, exhibitions, screenings, and film festivals, including Atticus Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Film Live (UK), Poetry Ireland Review (IRE), Quarterly West, and Salmagundi, among others. She was awarded a NYSCA Individual Artist's Grant in Poetry for a video/poem "chapbook" and is Senior Editor in Visual Art at Tupelo Quarterly.