“I was thinking about the potato salad in an

unstable environment”   (James Tate)

— how it threatened the city’s potholed streets and dilapidating tenements (where families squirmed at each new day’s sunrise) by sitting proudly as the exuberant picnic table centerpiece, how the potato salad overshadowed the main dishes and, being unstable, shed its uranium-like isotopes, eventually leaving behind an inert pile of starch

— or is the viewer an unstable environment and, as Gertrude Stein might have said, a potato salad is a potato salad is a potato salad? Does it matter whether the potato salad is served on a plate of fine china versus stuffed into a take-away carton from the local deli? In a world swirling with spatchcocked chicken and helium-chilled peach dessert foam, I would choose the take-away carton eight times out of ten. Yet between two dreams, I’d pick the more convoluted one. Of two dreams, the more piercing.

Other Deck of Cards:  Nine of Dirt

    In what ways have I been mistaken? There was a pile of dirt beneath our back stoop. My friends and I would sit and scoop the dirt away with spoons. My tricycle, upside-down, became a mining machine. I cranked the wheel and announced Next year we’ll be all the way to China, not realizing that once we dug past the molten core, we’d wind up in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where satellites fall and hurt no one, where ancient meteorites fell and hurt no one.