African Voices Summer 2016 (Digital) | Page 34

SHUFFLE MACHINE
What ruffles between
her fingers like
a thing with feathers,
two faces riffling,
glossy finished breaths,
each a volume of vortex
arrested and booked under
the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
a coffle of cardboard chaos
dovetailing a desire
that cannot be boxed or cut
by sharpest image edges
or Victoria’s secrets interlaced
into a deck’s sexy designs.
What’s held in
your table-side tank
of bated breath?
Necks pulse in vain,
throb like traffic lights
on a Saturday night,
hands clean as gloves
on a bourgeois burglar,
cuffed and cupped,
trembling, riffling the clay
chips lining the edge
of a bet that begs anarchy.
She is your Miss Fortune,
running fountain of infinity.
Everybody misses
the river except you.
Always the kissed banks
swishing the same.
The pot wants
to be right,
maybe raised.
What it gets
is to be splashed.
More and more under

each undealt door
through which “next” echoes,
there is a rising,
like the suddenness of
an unseen Aegean.
Now her
practiced hands pitch
tomorrow’s fate
across an oblong table.
The waitress brings
something you crave
as a daffodil doth
of the dew,
(no napkin, please)
says sip this,
her lips are full,
her wrists fragrant,
her heart too is barred.
I heard a bee buzz, honey
when I tried.
And if you tip her
over? Face up.
This ain’t origami,
(you are not allowed
to fold.)
And how would that change
the credit of the cards?
She would of course
simply re-deal
to your empty seat.
Maybe
she was only
the Queen of Hearts
peeled like a tamarind
by randomized hands
and you were never
her suited King.
© 2016 Joel Dias-Porter

34

african Voices