Fortune Favors the Brave

Finally, I am able to scribble in response to a Sunday Scribbling! After my online poetry course which is doing everything BUT inspire me, I am thankful for the good fortune to have found this tiny white piece of poem somewhere in the cluttered pocketbook of my mind. Too much, too much. I know! Does anyone else feel like if they don't eat their whole fortune cookie the fortune won't come true?


Fortune Favors the Brave

There once was a girl who saved every fortune cookie
fortune she ever received. She did not save them in the usual

places: pocketbook, novel spine, crease of wallet,
top of refrigerator, bottom of junk drawer, ten years

in the pocket of a favorite sweater. Instead, her bedroom
walls were papered with the tiny revelations

the way some people hang wallpaper.
Behind each bright white strip

a note, a memo regarding her misfortune
or fortune. Yes. Has come to pass.

Still waiting. Doubtful. Hopeful.
Would that this were true. Each tiny note

her own haiku of memory, a handwritten record of luck
bestowed and forsaken. She grew flowers

from her fingertips the night the fortune
read: You are a beautiful soul. Clouds ringed

her head all day following this lunchtime prophecy:
The wonders of nature surround you.

Soon, she would not rise from bed, breathe
a morning breath, without consulting her paper tarot.

She rode her luck on these thin white steeds,
catching dollar bills as they fell from trees,

lining her pockets with wit and charm,
warming her heart with tall, dark strangers.

Until, one morning she woke to strips spread
across her body slick as oil on canvas. Fortune tattoos

blanching her arms, her legs, her eyes. Bravely, blindly
she wrapped herself tightly in her quilt, waited to open.