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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Old man Wisteria (fortune teller)
\nsaved stones, red sealed envelopes
\ninside claw-foot bathtub, and bones
\nfrom his dinner. He cast them in dirt
\nthen burned to soot, taking the ashes
\n& marking a line across the apartment
\nwhere the demons were supposed to stay.<\/p>\n
Old man Wisteria’s wife (a psychic) died
\nten years ago. Since then, the neighbourhood
\ncats claw at his door, worse than a minotaur
\nin a maze. He waits. Come morning, he empties
\nthe tub full of black letters that fall off the page
\n(his eyes are bad in his old age, he only sees
\nthe future in a house of bones & knows he doesn’t
\nhave long in his apartment anymore). He stacks
\nthe paper into the cracks of the doors and windows.
\nHe waits, again, for morning.
\nWhen the downstairs neighbour (the tea leave reader)
\nfinds the body, months have passed. The old man’s mummified
\nto his chair, his stones and bones and empty letters
\nover his skin like a tattoo. Like a riddle for
\na fortune he left behind.<\/p>\n
The cats still come. A black one with a patch
\nof white over his eye–his third eye–in the shape of
\nwisteria is the loudest. The new owners (father & mythic son)
\ndon’t know how to get the claw marks out of the doors
\nor how to throw away stones that turn up the window sill, tangled
\nwith petals, red thread, and vines leaves, spinning
\ncounter-clockwise out the frames.
\nThe old man waits. And waits (as a spirit-self)
\nuntil morning. His future, now, always the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Old man Wisteria (fortune teller) saved stones, red sealed envelopes inside claw-foot bathtub, and bones from his dinner. He cast them in dirt then burned to soot, taking the ashes & marking a line across the apartment where the demons were supposed to stay. Old man Wisteria’s wife (a psychic) died ten years ago. Since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1388"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1391,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions\/1391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.polutexni.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}