"Bird's-Eye View" by Vera Hadzic
When I turn over my hands, the fortune-teller
Reads my palms like a map – as though each crease
Where sweat gathers is a topographic contour line,
The ones that huddle together to hint at steep ridges
Or carve deep and alone to tell of valleys
That reach all the way down
To the centre of the Earth.
The way she describes it, the crosshatch of my skin
Sorts the landscape of my life into strips or shapes
Like the quilt-patterning you see when you look
Out the window of an airplane.
The way she describes it, the map doesn’t lie.
If the fortune-teller’s table is something of an altar,
My palms are the organs of a sacrificial sheep
Spilled like dice so that she can divine the weather
From the marbling of the liver or the whispers
In the blood.
The way she describes it, each of the pink rivers
She traces with her fingernail will take me
Someplace else.
There’s something stupid in thinking she’ll say anything more
Than the speech she’s rehearsed, about the handsome man
In my future, mining steadfast into the sediments of my palms
Or about the good fortune blocking the forest trails
Which are etched into my skin.
The way she describes it, all that I am
And all I’ll be is written in the cliffs and canyons of my palms.
So is there anything in this map, I want to say,
That can tell me where the hell I’m going?
The way she describes it, the map is easy to read.
When I get home, no matter how hard I focus,
I can’t peer past the webs of skin, can’t find
The geography of my future, the misted valleys
And greenbelted forests and the lakes hidden
In the cups of my palms.
If the fortune-teller’s table is something of an altar,
The one in my kitchen is scabbed over with prayers like an amulet
From a cheap gift-shop, bought with the hope
That if you wear it down with the friction of your thumbs,
It will earn some kind of meaning.
In Ancient Rome, augurs read the will of the gods
In eagles, swallows, falcons, in the kites and the hawks,
In the spirals and the undercurrents and the eddies
That the birds chiselled into the sky.
Maybe it was the distance, all that space
Between the augurs and the birds
Or between the fortune-teller and my palms
That made it all legible.
Maybe if I had a pair of wings, I could fly
High enough to pick out the footprints
Of my future, high enough to make out
The X’s that mark my map.
Or maybe I’d just fly so high that my hands would look
Like someone else’s when I turned them over.
Reads my palms like a map – as though each crease
Where sweat gathers is a topographic contour line,
The ones that huddle together to hint at steep ridges
Or carve deep and alone to tell of valleys
That reach all the way down
To the centre of the Earth.
The way she describes it, the crosshatch of my skin
Sorts the landscape of my life into strips or shapes
Like the quilt-patterning you see when you look
Out the window of an airplane.
The way she describes it, the map doesn’t lie.
If the fortune-teller’s table is something of an altar,
My palms are the organs of a sacrificial sheep
Spilled like dice so that she can divine the weather
From the marbling of the liver or the whispers
In the blood.
The way she describes it, each of the pink rivers
She traces with her fingernail will take me
Someplace else.
There’s something stupid in thinking she’ll say anything more
Than the speech she’s rehearsed, about the handsome man
In my future, mining steadfast into the sediments of my palms
Or about the good fortune blocking the forest trails
Which are etched into my skin.
The way she describes it, all that I am
And all I’ll be is written in the cliffs and canyons of my palms.
So is there anything in this map, I want to say,
That can tell me where the hell I’m going?
The way she describes it, the map is easy to read.
When I get home, no matter how hard I focus,
I can’t peer past the webs of skin, can’t find
The geography of my future, the misted valleys
And greenbelted forests and the lakes hidden
In the cups of my palms.
If the fortune-teller’s table is something of an altar,
The one in my kitchen is scabbed over with prayers like an amulet
From a cheap gift-shop, bought with the hope
That if you wear it down with the friction of your thumbs,
It will earn some kind of meaning.
In Ancient Rome, augurs read the will of the gods
In eagles, swallows, falcons, in the kites and the hawks,
In the spirals and the undercurrents and the eddies
That the birds chiselled into the sky.
Maybe it was the distance, all that space
Between the augurs and the birds
Or between the fortune-teller and my palms
That made it all legible.
Maybe if I had a pair of wings, I could fly
High enough to pick out the footprints
Of my future, high enough to make out
The X’s that mark my map.
Or maybe I’d just fly so high that my hands would look
Like someone else’s when I turned them over.
Vera Hadzic is an eighteen-year-old writer from Ottawa, Ontario, currently studying English literature at the University of Ottawa.