Rien ne va plus. No more bets, you take the hand you’re dealt. The repurposed deck from the Times Square psychic, the empty tarot, the magician’s trick, the gambler’s debt. Shuffled into one deck, it’s that same, slight gesture that shifts fate. The image appears, the subject disappears.

The average cigarette takes five minutes to smoke and takes eleven minutes off the smoker’s life. Like cards, they line up so neatly in their box, a subtraction from an unknown number, an incomplete equation. We can name the loss, the lack, but not the sum. We name it as it turns to vapor, creeping past the tongue, an apparition of language, pigment as form.

Can you say the alphabet without singing it? Sometimes the acronym contains more than it stands for. M-I-M-A-L. A jagged stack of borders: this is where the line was drawn, and this is where one was painted. There’s a legend that Des Moines owes its name to French missionaries. Another claims it’s the Peroia word for shitface, misunderstood, butchered, then personified. A pin stuck in the heart of the map, an etymology of holy excrement. Myths and rumors, proselytizing waste.

Ritual abstracts and collapses, again and again, as the process evades what it reveals. The Madonna with her arms outstretched, a benevolent pinwheel of optical transcendence, fells the cards from their stack, landing in the spread of the Celtic Cross. Her embrace evokes a paper fortune-teller closing in on itself. The cootie-catcher is the first piece of origami most children learn to make; the Italians call it inferno-paradiso. Here the game is an intelligent death and a material lie. 

Divination stumbles in, tripping over itself as it propels onward, retinally transported via a slapstick domino effect. How to reach the fundamentality of our primal demand? Consult The Significator:

Above, across, below, before, and what will come.

Another punch line precedes the joke.

-Sabrina Tamar