Playing The Odds

a great clay jar
full of koshares, stripped clowns

shaking dice
you are sure that at night

when no one is about
they scramble forth

it is one thing to look
at the players before the slots

who seem, you say
as if they are at work

and another to ask myself
what brought me here

highway going north
so familiar

yet, how everything has changed
we must remark

I remember dancing at the Line Camp
thirty years ago

I remember when this, so magical, unknown
was not what I called home.

—

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Miriam Sagan is the author of 30 published books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). which just won the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and A Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa.