Tuesday, February 18, 2014

#96: TAROT AS VERB TAROTING MEAT

                  --for Selah Ann Saterstrom

“I saw you, sister, standing in this brilliance.”
                  --Paul Celan

Seeking potential conversations with the dead in grocery stores?  Lacking the respect of a churchyard, stacks of chopped bodies wrapped in plastic and styrofoam, stamped with dates and prices, the refrigerator is not the grave the human stomach is the grave.  Grocery store refrigerators are like any morgue awaiting someone to claim the body.  Take a deep breath, close your eyes and listen.  There is a particular and very noticeable chatter beneath the clear plastic shrouds, making the listener enter a quiet, cold meditation.  Stand before the hacked animal joints, stomach and shoulder fat, and cut the tarot deck nine times, then read the cards.

Memories stored in flesh all flesh all humans and other animals on the prairie, by the bay, in the city, or incarcerated in prisons or zoos (which are prisons built to amuse children and their nescient parents).  Memories of joy and suffering, anyone who has received extensive massage or acupuncture knows the body can release feelings long secluded in muscle and other tissue.  It’s a glorious thing such freedom.  Give this to grocery store animals with their fur ripped away, their tongues removed, their bones cracked and sawed from ligaments.  Pull the cards, pull them, see how they walked and felt the touch of sunlight.  Unfetter a bit of the pain.  One, two, three cards pulled for chops, roasts, and hamburger patties.  Take notes about love you have known for those who were shown none.  Notes from taroting at the display of conformist serial killing will become a poem, another communiqué, one for humans loosening their impediments of ignorance of suffering.