We sent a blast into our social universe asking for the joker to reveal themselves and were met with intrigue but no answers. Superstition says one cannot buy one’s own tarot deck. It must be passed down or bestowed.

“When my husband says divorce, / I start decorating the interior / of my cardboard tent, stock / it with cans of SpaghettiOs / and Bumble Bee (flip-topped), / re-do my hair into a wild Einstein / without the Nobel or any theories / about relativity…”

“…I do what has suddenly occurred to me with the bracing clarity of an Arctic sunrise, I break up with him…”

“This was true, but the dogs whose bowls I filled only just outnumbered those I injected with pentobarbital, running my hands along their backs as their eyes filmed over, just the way a skin of ice settles still and foggy overtop the glossy water of the creek.”

“Who but a maniac or a goddamn fool would sit down and write a novel attacking marriage? And who’d want to read such a novel?” For Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, these questions were rhetorical.