Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Memories of the Body Broken Review of Ambition Is Not a Dirty Word Review of The Blood of Flowers Review of The Girl Who Stopped Swimming Review of The Poet Laureate of People Who Hate Poetry Creative Nonfiction My Boo Radley By Rebecca Ward A Walk in the Park By Madonna Dries Christensen Poetry Hearts and Diamonds By Andrena Zawinski It Was Then I Kissed Her By Andrena Zawinski In By Andrena Zawinski Death of Word By Tony Brown Fiction Being Caught Up With My Ego By David Landrum A Voice In My Head Screamed By J. A. Tyler About the Contributors © 2008, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Kenneth Weiss, Ed.D Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Editor - Elizabeth Murray Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch. |
Hearts and Diamonds or the Lesson of the Gypsy Tea Room in Tasseography and Cartomancy By Andrena Zawinski Those Saturday afternoons of window shopping were the future dressed up as a beaded dress hanging in the Gimbel’s window display or a milky scarf draped over a steamer trunk at Joseph Hornes with trinkets of travel— pink champagne heels, smart brocade bag sporting a ticket out to someplace-else-not-here. Saturdays, before a sleepy matinee at the Warner Theatre for Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Splendor in the Grass, we traveled past the blast furnace layoffs, pig iron and molten steel of our parents’ lifelines in Pittsburgh, entered the muted narrow of hall, climbed two flights up and over the shoeshine parlor in Market Square, up to the Gypsy Tea Room, the two of us giddy with expectation. Lunch money in our change purses, we were ready to pay for what we wanted to hear, the price no more than the cost of little sandwiches trimmed down to white triangles smeared with egg salad we ate fast to get to a scoop of orange sherbet, dusty almond tea cakes on the side, all delivered on plates we thought surely good china. Then, of course, there was the tea. Three swirls of the cup to predict secrets of love, fortune, luck, to reappear as hearts and diamonds on common playing cards those magical Saturdays on the heels of long weeks of hall passes, feigned illnesses in a school nurse’s office, civics classes skipped for Coca Cola and chips at Isaly’s Dairy in West Park, filling the time between Saturdays. It was spring. We were sixteen. We wanted something we called more, wanted it now. We sipped our steeped tea slowly from dainty cups, ribbons of laced florets worn thin at the lips, watched leaves settle into blurs we conjured into foggy constellations of stars we hoped the gypsy fortune tellers would see, hearts athrob with promise of weddings to handsome, hard working stiffs who would make it back from a desert war, put rings on our fingers, give us all the bread and roses of our needs. The fortune tellers, all named Marie, wore bouffants matted into stiff caps of fashion, the tasseographers and cartomancers, our Queens of Hearts, their long red nails tapping cards as if to get their attention and ours away from slim cigarettes we nervously puffed, anticipating something yet to be, something we might yet become, spellbound by a desperation to grow up, to grow into someone else’s life, to get out, get away. Today, so many years after and a coast away, yet like a child adept at passing time, I became starry-eyed again, this time from the sun as I decorated clouds with patterns of girlish ways when a white pelican flew overhead, hauling its ancient structure of bones, as if defying gravity, to where I saw ghosts of ourselves looking upward and onward, crouched in a heart shaped cloud, diamonds in light shards crossing the sky. In the tea room, we learned little from words we posed as questions, postured as wishes, learned even less of loving or living on the journey into ourselves. We did not know then the idea of ourselves could dissolve like fog or mist or clouds into an unseen thing, that at the heart of the matter, we could have lived like there really was no tomorrow. --for Julianne |