To read it, you will need a nickel
or a thumb nail. To read it
you will need better luck
than the ones who wrote it.
What looks like gold leaf
does not flake off but cakes
into greasy reefs, and the parable
is not written under the foil.
Nor is its moral what we make
of these, the scratch tickets’ scabs.
Forget reading their leavings
like tea leaves. No, the parable
is the leech scraped from the card,
reverse alchemy: gold into lead.
—Jane Zwart
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and other publications.
