Sarah Lyn Rogers: Becoming the Magician

Temperance

The path appears clear but

strapped to that heavy pack

you will never reach the moon

Lay the burden down

Only with empty hands

can you hold slivers

feel them wax and wane

with closed eyes see light

With a crescent in each palm

the body understands balance

knows how to pour water

in an arc against gravity

Each hand holds tea

the right temperature

to drink

Becoming The Magician

you covered your soles

and the heels of your hands

hid coins in the lining of your coat

let this not be the last

that I have, you thought

let it not, let it not, let it not

a too-tight lid obstructs

air, traps steam, what breathes

bubbles over or must perish

you did not perish

raised the heels of your hands

to the sky and said I can hold this

to anything that you were given

and for a time you did,

even juggled to make room

for more until your arms grew tired

still you did not perish

raised the heels of your hands

to the sky and said what flows

through me is huge, which is how

what I hold now weighs nothing

---

Sarah Lyn Rogers is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the former Fiction Editor of The Rumpus. She is the author of Inevitable What (Sad Spell Press, 2016), a chapbook on magic and rituals. A collaborative poem she wrote with Isobel O’Hare appears in the Black Lawrence Press anthology They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Creative Writing (2018). For more of Sarah's writing, and for tarot medicine poetry, visit sarahlynrogers.com.