a tarot reading performed with Sylvia Plath and a shot of whiskey
I. THE FOOL
We travel. Free and whole and unalarmed until sideswiped by the consequences of possibility: expectation, revelation, vertigo. The stepping over the edge before realizing the edge was there. The failure to heed any warning, body in the sun, unaware of itself.
The telephone rings, it has something to say. The telephone rings, almost something living, an almost connection, illuminated phantom until the screen goes black. A mirror in my pocket: I can find my face in it. But before a phone was a mirror, it came in parts. There used to be two halves: the piece plugged into the wall and the part we held onto, handle-shaped, in the hand and to the ear and the mouth, we cradled it, we called it the receiver. Giving and receiving, these two halves: a process like splitting the brain into left and right. Still the same brain but still no one can see it. Still the same mirror but whose face is mine—I cannot hang up this mirror anymore in a way that makes noise, cannot slam the phone down can only slide a finger across the glass, let it go black, let it become again a void, dread still humming, dizzying as a mirror.
A knife, too, has a handle to hold on to.
A knife carves its words into surfaces—tree bark, plaster, skin. Words that appear, too, on the surface of the phone kept in my pocket, the pocket where some people also keep knives folded, waiting to flick open, to slash, to strike. The message is the same every time: keep reading. The tarot cards say it too. A rearrangement of images but still the same story, the game is discovering which page we will start with this time.
Today it is a rearrangement of the same words: today, she is.
II. QUEEN OF SWORDS
I think I might be Sylvia Plath reincarnate. I study her features in the mirror. That I am her double is unremarkable: we all have a shadow, even at night. In the cards I am The Emperor, Aries, my moon The Devil, Capricorn; my self a shadow, the shadow of chaos, the chaos internal of the unforgiving self. I am a wildfire; I am scorched earth. I am Sylvia and she was ruled by Death. My eyes are grey but hers are greyer. Features go unshaped: when I am her, a nose is just a nose. I watch her face as I touch myself and I want to make her come, know I am making her come, finger slipped inside, hot pulsing, she is coming now, we are coming, we are coming together. We finish. She grins at me, we grin at each other, vibrating, red flush, the mirror a cold violence, the lover to lean into. I press my forehead against hers and feel the fever, see the fog spread with my breath, I touch the glass with the tip of my tongue and she receives it. She gives me her ear and I take, share the message through our secret game of telephone: I want to spend my life with you becomes I want to spin my life with you I want to spin my life untrue I want to spin a web or two I want to be a spider I want to spy on her I want to lie beside her I want to die beside her I want to die.
This dark thing that sleeps in me, I guess you could say I’ve a call. I know the bottom, oh, you strange girl—how you lie and cry after
what long ago hurt.
III. SIX OF CUPS
I wish I was the kind of person who found satisfaction in screaming. Instead of screaming, I think about space. In space, I hear, there is no sound, no echo within the vacuum, unlike the roar behind the darkness when my eyelids fall shut. I wonder if in space I could even hear my own heartbeat. I wonder if I could even see my own breath. Could infinity be coffin-like? Both death and the universe traps that trap because to enter into either means going no farther, nowhere else to go from here. I hear space is cold, but so is the mirror. So is the blade of a knife, smooth and sharp, it’s velvet, it’s crystal, it’s ice. Sylvia and I are both looking. Or if I am her, I am history repeating, the woven pattern, to be trapped within and broken through, strands of infinity left sticking in my hair, echoes of screams that were released centuries ago still piercing the quiet and each one is a reminder I’ve encountered the truth: neither knife nor phone is mirror. A phone is only a phone and a knife is only a knife and I am the only one speaking, I am the one who is speaking, I am the one in the mirror, I’m sad, I’m sad.
Another misunderstanding: I am a disaster becomes don’t look at me.
I’ll scream but the noise of it will not mean anything, will not translate to anything other than sound. I’ll scream but only as long as I am breathing, the echo of my emptiness will drift onward into space.
The truth is I don’t want to be myself today.
Death is the only story I know, my body the process.
IV. THE MOON
Awareness has neither a center nor boundaries. Awareness is a house at night with the lights turned off, awareness is a mirror, there is always a mirror, there is always a mirror and I see from both sides. Every choice is an illusion and with each choice I risk an opening, like a star that punctures the night. A star is a shaped thing and it is a word, when it’s written; a word is a voice is a light. I am her echo. The reflection of my face is never enough. I look again and return to the beginning, an offering: you choose now, you choose. But it is unclear when the beginning ends and the body becomes itself, the one doing the choosing rather than receiving the suggestion. A body does not choose to come into being, a mind does not choose the body it inhabits, and we do not choose to be born but then here we are, and here is the mirror reminding us we are seen. Here is the mirror, offering me a face I don’t recognize as mine. Here is the mirror, saying oh you strange girl. Here is the mirror, saying now you choose.
I skirt around the subject by stepping out of the frame. Instead of unplugging my phone from the wall, instead of yanking, I slide my finger across the screen to turn it off. The transformation is as satisfying as stillness becoming stillness. The cold, dead rock of the moon offers the possibility of renewal when it appears in blackness, when the moon goes new, dark enough to see myself by, there goes my shadow, she’s walking at night.
If I can reconstruct my mind to make sense of its calamity, if I can reinvent the mirror as that which reflects my body rather than that which deceives, if I can readapt to a knife in the kitchen as only a knife, if I can close my eyes without wanting to scream—
I might stand a chance.
Or if I stand before the glass again and then lean toward it, just a little bit closer, if I lean in and catch her eye again and see that it’s my eye and we are the same—to die beside her.
She winks at me.
She offers a beginning.
Now, you choose.
Author’s note: This dark thing that sleeps in me, I know the bottom, and how you lie and cry after it are all borrowed from “Elm” by Sylvia Plath; I guess you could say I’ve a call is borrowed from “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath; oh, you strange girl is borrowed from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Heather Bartel is a deeply rooted Midwesterner currently living in Athens, GA. She is founder and editor of the literary journal and community, The Champagne Room. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Qu, MAYDAY, Fence, and Heavy Feather Review.