My poem, In the Cards, is in the current issue of Sheila-Na-Gig. Here is the poem:

In The Cards

My grandmother read tea leaves in a storefront
on Belmont Avenue. Outside, pushcarts

lined both sides of the street,
selling thimbles and twine, potatoes and chickens.

She’d cradle a calloused hand to examine the lines
of life and grief and their storied intersections,

peer deep into the crystal for the recently lost
or long-departed to offer some small slice of hope.

Grandma liked to tell me she sweetened their lives
the way a small piece of flanken sweetened the borscht,

as we shared a pot of honeyed tea and slices of babka,
and a game of 500 Rummy she never, ever lost.