Casino
by Amy Meckler
The casino’s like a cave with Christmas lights,
whistles and bells sound like a little girl’s
bike in heavy traffic. Here hides your fortune
or failure—how much can you lose in one night?
Green bills turn to speckled chips in a blink. Now spin,
roll, raise, hit or tip your money away.
It’s so easy to get carried away—
no signs of outside, no clocks or sunlight,
no window to the hours wasted spinning
your wheels at the slot machines while girls
in sequined bikinis bring you shots all night,
enough liquor to make up for the fortune
you’re losing quarter by quarter, a fortune
of silver turned liquid and spilling away.
Where will you be at the end of the night,
up a few bucks, or broke and lit?
Maybe the dealer will choose you from the girls
who toss him their keys. Maybe a quick spin
under him will stop your head from spinning
from the fluorescents. A woman with a fortune
on her finger giggles like a high school girl
as her husband colors up and whisks her away
to the honeymoon suite. You think it’s still night.
A few lucky pulls at twenty-one, you’re as light
as the cherry bobbing in your drink. Someone lights
a cigar at your luck. The smell sends you spinning
to twelve years old, when your dad taught you cards all night,
the first time you won a toothpick fortune,
proving luck wants to give herself away
to any asker. You believed it as a girl,
grew up with money to lose. Other girls
walk in the casino for a way out, light—
headed addicts over their limits, stowing away
fear to bluff the guy showing three queens, spin
the roulette wheel, bet a fortune
on black. Double zero. The end of the night.
Two tired girls stumble off their stools, spin
toward the door; their fortunes wait for another night.
It’s dark and light at the same time as you walk away.
Amy Meckler’s poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Rattapallax, Margie, Lyric, The Maine Review, In Parentheses, Poetry South, and Cider Press Review, among other publications. Her first collection, What All the Sleeping Is For, won the 2002 Defined Providence Press Poetry Book Award. She received her MFA from Hunter College and works in New York City as a sign language interpreter.
