Steve Deutsch

Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and is poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. His Chapbook, Perhaps You Can, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full length books, Persistence of Memory and Going, Going, Gone, were published by Kelsay. Slipping Away will be published this spring. Brooklyn was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press and will also be published this spring.

In The Cards

My grandmother read tea leaves in a storefront
on Belmont Avenue. Outside, pushcarts

lined both sides of the street,
selling thimbles and twine, potatoes and chickens.

She’d cradle a calloused hand to examine the lines
of life and grief and their storied intersections,

peer deep into the crystal for the recently lost
or long-departed to offer some small slice of hope.

Grandma liked to tell me she sweetened their lives
the way a small piece of flanken sweetened the borscht,

as we shared a pot of honeyed tea and slices of babka,
and a game of 500 Rummy she never, ever lost.