Photo by Debbie Berk
Fortune Teller
If you can’t read my fortune
on my rusted, moldy palms,
Wipe up your glasses!
… and if it didn’t work,
your lies would be appreciated
But please don’t tell me how to wash
the damn dust of adversity
as it’s taken root
like a parasite in my cells
and don’t tell me how to scrub
the ruffle rust of the last rain
that’s been pouring for forty years
and drowned my Noah’s ark
If you can’t read my fortune
even through the crystal rays,
Doubt for a moment!
One of us is no longer alive!
_______________
Soodabeh Saeidnia (soodabehsaeidnia@gmail.com) lives in NYC but originally is Persian. She got her Pharm D and Ph.D. of Pharmacognosy and has worked as a researcher, assistant and associate professor in the Kyoto University (Japan), TUMS (Iran) and University of Saskatchewan (Canada). She is interested in English literature and poetry, and has published a collection of her poems, Words for myself, in Farsi. Her English poems have been published in different anthologies and literary magazines including “Careless Embrace of the Boneshaker” (by Great Weather for Media) “Squawk Back”, “Indiana Voice Journal”, “Scarlet Leaf Review”, “Sick Lit Magazine”, “Dying Dahlia Review”, “Sisyphus Quarterly”, “Poetry Life and Time”, “Paradox”, “TimBookTu”, “Babbling of the Irrational”, “SPINE”, “Tuck Magazine”, “La Libertad”, “Tiny Poetry”, “The Pen”, and “352 degrees”. The first collection of her contemporary poems “Street of the Ginkgo Trees”, and also the newly released anthologies (She is both the editor and contributor) “Voice of Monarch Butterflies” and “Apple Fruits of an Old Oak” are now alive on Amazon.