Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card…The Wasteland, T.S Eliot
Cross this vending machine with silver and writer and fortune teller Kym Deyn will tell you your future.
Inspired by folk wisdom, the mysteries of the tarot, and vintage fortune telling machines like the famous Zoltar, Kym has produced a series of fortune telling cards that include a micropoem, lucky numbers and inauspicious days.
These cards are placed at the intersection between poetry and serendipity, words and magic. They are for wondering, for lifting back the veil in the same way a child lifts a rock in the woods: to peer at something strange. Think of the delicious otherworld of the fairground, filled with lights and spun sugar, tightrope walkers and fortune tellers. The Vending Machine Oracle is filled too with old English folktales, lindworms and graveyard grims, stories from other times and still for this one. These cards are about escape as much as personal reflection. Whether they are the true words of an oracle, or the cheap natterings of a carnival mounteback is up to you. The Vending Machine Oracle simply says what she sees.
Kym Deyn is a writer and fortune teller. They have a micro chapbook forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books, and have been selected for Nine Arches’ Primers Vol. 6. They have been widely published in anthologies and journals and one of the winners of the 2020 Outspoken Prize for Poetry and recently received an Arts Council DYCP grant for their queer audio drama work.
Kym Deyn can be found on the web at kymdeyn.com and on Twitter here