skonen_blades

Five elements make up the earth. Five points a pentagram.
There were five wounds on Jesus Christ. Five fingers on a hand.
The number five’s significant. It’s all through ancient lore.
And yet our playing cards have suits that number only four.

The spades that dig , the hearts that love, the clubs that bludgeon heads
The diamonds glitter. Every suit in shades of blacks and reds.
The cards can tell a story of deceit and sex and death.
Money, shovels, baseball bats, a lover’s dying breath

The cards can also educate about society
Royalty’s outnumbered but they have the power, see?
So many of the cards that number down from ten to ace
Are cards that by design don’t even have a person’s face.

The symbols on the playing cards are metaphors for life
And like those metaphors they can bring happiness or strife
Parables, morality, mortality and more
But yet the suits involved in decks of cards are only four

Yet five’s the number echoing back through the centuries.
Why four suits? There’s more to this than everybody sees.
There was another suit existed sure as I’m alive
I swear upon a pirate’s grave, they used to number five

There was a suit that lit the rest. A suit that banished night.
A suit of lamps. A suit of stars. It was a suit of light.
Lanterns it was called back then. The lantern suit of cards.
Lanterns lit the spades, the clubs, the diamonds and the hearts

You can’t spade a grave by feel, and hearts are ruled by sight
Diamonds don’t shine in the dark and clubs need help at night
How the lantern suit was shaped is lost to history
Possibly a flame or star was its geometry

It’s known the suit was odd because the highest card was jack
Jack of Lanterns was the highest card in every pack
For Jack had killed the Lantern King and claimed his lantern throne
He told the Queen to leave his house and now he ruled alone.

And so the King of Lanterns only had a leering skull
The Queen had running makeup tears, with racoon eyes gone dull
While Jack became the lantern made to light the crooked way.
The ray of light, the ray of hope, was Jack O Lantern’s ray.

Jack of Lantern’s rebel ways inspired all the players.
Gave them hope against the rich and lifted all their cares
Jack was always pictured with a horrid, leering smile.
Friendly, charming, scary, daring, rakish, full of guile

The suit was banned in 1410 by order of the lash.
Within a decade every deck of cards was burned to ash
And every hand that held a card was severed from its arm
Decks of cards were decks of death. They brought the owner harm.

It looked as though all playing cards were gone forever then
Along with all the thousand card games kept in mortal ken
The King who banned the cards? His name’s forgotten. Or erased?
Records of the royal family ruling can’t be traced

Decks of cards did not exist for one whole century
The only place they dared to come again was deep at sea
Pirates made new decks of cards away from legal eyes
Half-remembered one-eye jacks, and kings of suicide

The harshest laws regarding cards were focused on the lights
Most cards came back but lanterns stayed in darkness due to fright
Lanterns stayed a secret suit that no one dared to play
No one dared, and no one played, and so it went away

One thing you can’t do with light is keep it in the dark
It might change but it’ll find a way to keep the spark
Jack of Lanterns drifted into legend, myth and fable
Even though his suit was gone from every poker table

Cards survived but lights did not. The suit became extinct.
Yet every Halloween you’ll see a symbol that is linked
When settlers came to foreign soil, they brought Jackie, too.
And now from every pumpkin head, Jackie looks at you.

Jack O’Lantern stares from houses giving kids the treats
His smile lights the houses stairs as tiny teeth eat sweets
He smiles at the pranks and tricks all played on Hallow’s eve
Jackie lives. That king is dead and he is not bereaved.

Affection, violence, labour, wealth, REBELLION is the key
Rebel against the definitions of society
Define yourSELF and hope will lead the path you dare to tread
For Jack is nimble. Jack is quick. Despite the pumpkin head.

So every Halloween remember Jack O Lantern’s face.
It is a suit of cards integral to the human race.
Remember Jack the fearless one, the one that lit the way
Although his suit’s forgotten, Jackie never went away.




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My stutter came back in full force when she paid for her gum.

She had the small ears and strong scooping jaw that all the northlanders had. Something about eating the tough skin of the fish they lived off of for so many hundreds of years and ears grown small and almost vestigial from centuries of arctic wind. There were old jokes about how they could never listen to reason because of their small ears. Also, it was said that they could bite a leg off or chew through doors if provoked.

Myths, of course, but I’d never met one who smiled or looked a person directly in the eye until now.

I worked in Nukatiukut’s first Seven Eleven. The glamour of the position had worn off within hours. I was doing the night shift but at this time of year, that meant nothing. The sun beat down outside even though it was four in the morning. The occasional late-night partier would come in and look for local traditional foods and find only candy bars and doritos. Usually, they’d leave with a pair of cheap sunglasses since that was about the only useful thing that this store sold.

It was comical seeing the one truck a month of Oh Henry bars, Twizzlers, and Gatorade come here to sit and gather dust on the shelves. One month later the truck would come back, load up on the unused stock and drop off a fresh batch. This was not a corner of the world that was ready for this kind of consumerism. It was like a brightly lit green and orange spaceship had landed on the edge of town and had broken down there.

It our business plan was a dog, it would have whimpered.

I grew up with a stutter. My name was Noi but everyone called me Nanoi. First it was a name that was used to make fun of the way I’d introduce myself as a child (n-n-Noi) but after a while, it grew to become the name I used and the one-syllable name on my birth certificate dimmed. Now only my parents called me Noi.

I had read about speech therapy and tried some out. If I was calm and pictured music, I did not stutter. If I was shocked, it would come back with force until I controlled myself.

The northlander had come up and snapped her packet of gum down on the counter along with some change.

She looked directly at me with eyes that could harpoon a walrus.

A hard green that was somehow colder and brighter than the snow on the ground with a dark ring of flint around them matching her pupils. They pinned me like an insect to the cigarettes and potato chips behind me.

“Th-th-th-that’ll b-b-be six-seventy f-f-f-five.” I stammered.

She left six and stared at me as if daring me to ask her for more money.

I swept the six off of the counter and turned to the cash register. Because I was flustered and because she was the first customer I’d served in days, I briefly forgot how to use it. I figured it out and with some electronic beeps and a sound like I’d won something small in Vegas, the cash drawer clanged out.

I put her change in and closed the cash.

When I looked up, she was gone.

The bell on the door rang when she left.

I went back to reading about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and dreamed small-town dreams in which my face and the face of the northlander were taped over Brad’s and Angela’s as we went to far off countries and adopted children who had never seen a snowfall and rolled in tall grass.



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