Foretold During A Sleepover With 12-Year-Old Girls

 

Ghost stories and gossip, forgotten

when she showed us the Ouija board

filched from her older sister’s room.

Outside, dry leaves scraped fingertips

across pavement as wind swirled them

in patterns that may, too, have been messages,

but we clustered over the board’s dark formal script,

giggling, nervous, accusing each other

of willfully steering the plastic indicator,

denying we steered it ourselves, calling out

letters forming words forming prophecies.

 

I asked my future husband’s name

and was given the letter M

followed by A, then R, finally C.

No one by the name Marc in our classes,

so I wasn’t teased like girls who got

Tim or Michael or Kyle.

 

When I met you two years later

your name ended in a K.

Teasing, I nicknamed you Marcus,

sometimes call you that still.

After all these years,

I see what I couldn’t then.

Mark, my love, your name

was already spelled

by every letter on that board.

Laura Grace Weldon

Originally published in Verse-Virtual.  Find more poems in my collection, Tending.