When the palm reader takes my left hand in her right one,
she informs me that I will live longer than my younger brothers,
and one of them will die from a cocaine overdose, the other
an accidental drowning. When I told my parents this, my father
went on a roadtrip to Idaho and woke up in the bluegrass every morning,
cooked himself baked beans from a can and waited for the cell phone
to ring, bearing the bad news. My mother stayed home
and found a long-distance lover who came to visit her
from fifty miles away each day and had a penchant for making love
on the kitchen floor under the harsh light of the open fridge,
dark red sludge leaking from rotten apples on the counter.
Albert Einstein once remarked
that coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous,
which is maybe why when my father drowned in a remote lake
somewhere far off in Idaho and my mother found her lover
naked, eyes closed in the bathtub with white powder ringing
his mouth like sugar, she made me swear
never to see a palm reader or psychic again.