Next Time

This actual fortune was inside my fortune cookie this past weekend. My son was in town, with his friend who is a girl and also a roomie, and we all had great family wamily time, which included breakfast out, while my daughter was working the counter (but, alas, we/I got the timing wrong, so we had to sit in a booth instead of at the counter, where we could have tipped her big!), and Chinese carry-out because, well, I am not a good cook.

Also a double feature: Total Recall and The Avengers. Very loud, very sci fi, very wonderful. (More, perhaps, on Total Recall and Philip K. Dick later.)

We had extra cookies, so we had our choice of fortunes. My second fortune was this: "Your power is in your ability to decide." First I had to decide what the heck this meant. Was it about the nature of my power? How much I have? Whether and how to exercise it?  As in, Your future is in your own hands.

OR did it mean, as I just realized today, "Your power [resides in] your ability to decide," or, again in other words, "Your ability to make decisions determines how powerful you are." Ack! I am a crappy decision maker. This is not only a weakness of mine, but, because of past crappy decisions, an ongoing source of mild anxiety. No wonder I blocked this particular interpretation. Sigh...

Fortunately, since I had not ordered the shrimp (a crappy decision), and since my own boy had returned to Chicago and work, A Boy and His Lobster arrived in my mailbox today--that is, the Arsenic Lobster anthology 2012, including my poem, "Cassandra Observes the Midwestern Landscape in September" from the Spring 2012 issue online. There are neither lobsters nor shrimp in the Midwestern landscape around here, just sumac, windmills, and corn. But here is a box of lobsters, in a photo by editor Susan Yount. The cover art is by Heather Gorham.

This fabulous anthology is like a whole seafood platter! With French fries! And buttered rolls. Poems by Ricky Garni, Donna Vorreyer, Maureen Alsop, Kate Greenstreet, Rob Cook, Arielle Greenberg, Michaela A. Gabriel, Simon Perchik, George Kalamaras, Carlo Matos, and many, many more.