Rich Ives

The Last Fortune Teller in Cleveland

by Rich Ives

I’m not the one who confessed I was flibberjabbered out and out and rubadubbed with the
what now. I refused the paper shoes and plastic pants. I wouldn’t discuss caressing ungulates, so I wasn’t exactly the life of the party the two of us were having, but sometimes when I’m going along I can smell my participation in the swamp. I don’t like the way it lingers after the joke’s over.

It’s true I had been walking on the frozen lake, which was way bigger than I am, for such a long time that I thought I should be arriving at something. The man I was that way was only a shadow of a man, although a man that I had learned to irritate. I had to consider which mistake a person might have been in that elevated shadow that could have been worthy of my misattentions.

I wasn’t thinking about collecting signposts, but I was sleepy, and my portable attention was driving me into it, so my job title became Amplifier of Silence and Generous Oversight.

I had already turned to crime, but when crime turned back to me, I turned docile, not wanting to support anything I could so easily accomplish, which became a different kind of crime. Ordinary people turn to extraordinary devices to save them from ordinary discoveries that wait for a response.

The other man I had become stole his porn name from his neglected goldfish. Inside his understanding of his selves, the windows had grown cloudy with self-sustaining milkiness. A child is outside, usually, and won’t let him in. Her face is made of a pleasant rubber. She can remove it, but she seldom does.

The other woman wore a cardigan made of lint from a mouse filter. She always said hello using an ant farm containing sleepwalking fog sounds. The painting of herself that she gave me I mounted on the wall. It makes a hole I can disappear in.

So now my deciduous ardor returns with a surprising force just when she has accepted its absence. (My secret life began in Victorian England before I had a deeper self to keep myself from.) My ardor responds to the moon and often confuses the planets.

Only self-deception warrants this kind of attention.

Rich Ives is a winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. Tunneling to the Moon, a book of days with a work for each day of the year, is available from Silenced Press, Sharpen, a fiction chapbook, is available form Newer York Press, Light from a Small Brown Bird, a book of poems, is available from Bitter Oleander Press, and his story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, is now available from What Books.