Tom C. Hunley

The Card You Kept Drawing


Right on the face-card
you saw blotches,
the great red machinery
of broken pledges
blossoming anew
at the tremor called flash point.
You raged ahead
and bet the wilderness within.

You reached for the card,
a bitch goddess
who breaks you every time.

Your watch, like an anchor
shaken loose by free liquor,
shouted that you should be anywhere
but here at this blonde, drunken table,
shrieked at the card
not to surface,
as she always does
at each incremental deviation
from what brokenness
tasted like before.


Copyright 1997, Tom C. Hunley


Tom C. Hunley graduated from the University of Washington Extension Program in 1991 and obtained an M.F.A. from Eastern Washington University in 1996. Currently, he writes for the PR department at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. He is published in Exquisite Corpse, Jeopardy, Printed Matter, Verve, Free Lunch, Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere.

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