Eve Elizabeth Moriarty: How I Wrote ‘Card Trick’

Interview by George Sandifer-Smith

“Sometimes if I’m being flippant I say basically my entire writing career is based on pointing out that some stuff is a bit like other stuff”

Card Trick

We measure my lunulae: the doctor and me.
They’re those half moons of white
under your manicure. They tell you all sorts of things,
calcium levels, how dead
from the chemo your nails are,
the deep grooves in them like keyed car
doors. It’s almost necromancy. It’s almost
augury, like having your chart read
in a dim room off a fluorescent shopping
centre corridor that smells of pot
and methyl methacrylate
from the salon next door.
For an extra five you can have your cards
done, and when you’ve exhausted
every other diagnostic that stops feeling
so silly. I don’t know about you
but I always pull the same one last, breath held
against coincidence, the teller’s acrylic nails
barnacled with rhinestones and flipping him over:
the pale rider. The skeletal face, renal-failure piss-dark
robe and my own hollow sockets sagging. Embarrassing
contrast when her groomed hands take mine. Bloom of nausea.
Her voice into the quiet air, telling me death – honey – it don’t
always mean
the things it says
to your face.

The ‘bleed’ between the medical and the mystical in the language in this poem is very interesting. What inspired this?

I’m glad that’s something that stuck out to you – the collection this is from, which will be submitted for my PhD this coming year – is actually structured around the concept of the four humours, and there are a few other pieces in there exploring treatment, diagnosis and illness in general through the lenses of alchemy, ritual and divination. If you think about ancient medicine, it was often an arcane guessing game where magic and science weren’t really that different. Some things worked (often not for the reasons people thought they did!) and others are obviously just absolute nonsense to our modern eyes, but I think in a historical sense the medical and mystical are the same thing.

I wrote this piece during and after experiencing a solid two years of very hit and miss attempts at treating a rare autoimmune disease I was diagnosed with in 2019, and during that time it really became clear to me that in some areas of medicine we really are just still guessing and some of our methods are still fairly crude. Chemotherapy for example – taking poison to make yourself better – is a focus in this piece, and something I found so strange. I was making myself really unwell to try and treat my haywire immune system in a way that didn’t feel dissimilar to some of the ancient cures you read about in medieval medicine.

I’m also really interested in the way so much of wellness culture feels vaguely mystical – completely unproven or untested supplements and salves and routines that begin to feel or seem like ritual, especially as so much of that world does blend the spiritual and the pseudoscientific in a way conventional medicine has largely moved away from.

The shape of this poem means it thins out towards the end. Is this intentional? How important is the shape of the poem on the page for you?

I was keen to create a sense of dwindling, almost a fatigue setting in in the narrator’s speech. The poem is about sickness and treatment and there are lines in there like “when you’ve exhausted / every other diagnostic…” which suggest a long, bumpy course of treatment, so I started out with the poem being quite dense and then as you say thinning out, perhaps becoming exhausted and paring down to that final idea at the end.

Page shape is less important to me than the internal structure more generally – I really like it when a poem feels solid, like a sturdy bit of furniture. I haven’t really explored concrete poetry for myself, but as I started out writing pretty much exclusively for performance and now write pretty much exclusively for the page, my priorities have definitely shifted in terms of how much attention I pay to the actual look of the thing. For me, breaking the line at the right moment is always the most important thing – I want to use that break to either create some ambiguity, draw attention to a specific word or make some kind of additional meaning, rather than just do what feels “poem-ish” or looks neat for the page. I want to make the spaces work as hard for me as the words I’m choosing.

The ending few lines – with the voice of the fortune teller – is very evocative of reading poetry as well as reading cards, that sense of not taking things at face value. Is this an important element of your work?

Sometimes if I’m being flippant I say basically my entire writing career is based on pointing out that some stuff is a bit like other stuff. Like that’s such a key aspect of poetry, using one thing to say another, clarifying or illuminating something via abstraction or complication. I think tarot is such a rich seam to mine for poetry and reflection because you have to think laterally and search about for what a certain image might mean for you, and because it’s entirely about interpretation. I’m not a huge fan of the literal – I like a bit of wiggle room around meaning.

The idea of death in tarot often being a good or neutral card, that it can symbolise an aspect of life or a relationship ending, or even a new start or rebirth, is very compelling. It’s like New Year’s Eve or a royal succession, when the death of one thing is immediately followed by a brand new one. That idea in Larkin’s ‘First Sight’ always comes back to me, the idea that the Spring is just waiting to come, even underneath the snow. And of course in this piece the narrator is facing the possibility of literal death, and I hope that in quite a dark poem that suggestion does let in a little crack of light, a little suggestion of hope.

On a slightly different note I do also want to look at that idea of face value – I think people will often see a poem as being about the poet themselves, and while the confessional is a valuable mode I do think it’s really important to remind the reader they might not be reading what they think they are. Obviously our work is influenced by our own experiences, but my supervisor said something to me in one meeting which I’ve always kept in mind since – when I expressed concern that a voice I was trying to write in didn’t feel authentic to me, she basically challenged the idea that it had to feel like ‘me’ in a way that I found really liberating. That opened a door to try things I wouldn’t have otherwise – the reported speech in this piece, for example, is quite unusual for the way I write, and is in a register I don’t really use. But I liked the contrast of this woman with her acrylic nails and casual, matter of fact attitude doling out this profound advice and trading in the divine. I love people like that – I’m quite a sceptic in many ways but I always find a medium in normal clothes who looks like one of your mum’s friends way more convincing than someone going for the whole mystic meg schtick. But coming back to the question itself, yes, I would definitely agree that having a layered, ambiguous approach to meaning is a really significant part of my work.