The Child’s Spell

Each month the opportunity
I’ve flubbed 580 times since
instructed: incant
White Rabbit, White Rabbit

before fluttering open crusty eyes
on the 1st of the month
and gain good luck
all 28, 30, 31 days

before the moon gets fat and thin,
before luck runs out and I stub
toes, lose lovers, my hair,
skin my shin, run over a friend’s dog,

cut down the wrong tree,
kill the peach, pick up a cold
from a snotty kid.
Who can afford to toss good luck

588 times, 690?
Will I live long enough to throw it away,
along with the trash, say,
1460?

Or can I learn?
Avoid the slippery walk, the red-flag lover,
closed glass doors, the drunk driver?
On the 30th or 31st, I set a chant alarm

White Rabbit, White Rabbit
so I can sing along and skip
through that month never feeling
any pain, never tumbling over a brutal corner.

In this way wresting from fate
the little bit of safety I’ve been denied
by the crazy age I lived in
and the loss of an absent father.

Betsy Fogelman Tighe, winner of a 2025 Pushcart, has published widely, winning two Oregon Poetry Association prizes, been a semi-finalist for two manuscript prizes and the Loraine Williams Prize. She recently retired from work as a teacher-librarian in Portland, OR, where she also gardens and dotes on two adult children.