Portrait
~ Sean Lyon

Flour floats to rest
on the pizza shop owner’s
black orthopedic
boots as he catches spinning dough
with all the gravitas
of receiving
his dead mother’s
fine wedding china
falling from the sky in busted
parachutes, plate after
plate after plate.

While She’s Tending Bar
~ James A. Clark

Bono comes through the speakers
singing about mysterious ways
as she mixes her many potions
with careless liquid grace,
and I think she’s perfect—
until I catch her from the corner
of my eye, sweet-talking some suit,
putting on a phony Southern Belle,
bird-dogging the tip jar,
and then I know for sure.

Past Tense
~ Laura Winkelspecht

I still find myself talking
about you in present tense
like you’re still here
to add tales to our story,
but our verbs occupy
the past now,
a dying language
where I am the last
fluent speaker
longing for just one more
conversation.

My worries are pink gerbera daisies
~ Marga Fripp

My heart,
your worries are
pink gerbera daisies —
large blooms, bold
and long-lasting,
flawless in form,
seed-bearing bright eyes
in the center,
nightless silhouettes
holding on
to the darkness within.

I was going through some old files today, and found my notes from a workshop I presented on the Devil in Tarot. At the time, there was a string of highly public insider trading cases which caught several people in its web, starting with Michael Milken, Dennis Levine, Martin Siegel, and Ivan Boesky. Sadly, this excerpt from the workshop is just as applicable here in 2018, with the endless string of charges and indictments surrounding the current occupant of the US White House.

Paul Huson challenges us to think of the Devil not just as evil, but as avoidable evil. This requires us to take responsibility for our choices, and that’s not always a comfortable thing to do, particularly when dealing with things considering unacceptable by one’s culture. “The devil made me do it” or “I was deceived by someone else” or whatever other-blaming excuse we can come up with is more convenient than admitting the truth of our own bad choices. However, if we refuse to acknowledge our role in the situation, if we externalize and play the victim, it saves our reputation, and perhaps our ego, but creates greater discomfort in the long run because we are refusing the lesson of our soul—which means, yes, we’ll go through this again.

There are times when someone is a victim, and let’s not blame them for their situation. But how many times does someone claim to be a victim of another person’s machinations, when the reality is they just didn’t think they’d get caught?

The Devil from The Aquarian Tarot by David Palladini