I Consider My Hands After a Friend Calls Them Lovely
I consider their age, forty-one years and three months.
Piano fingers, my mom used to say when she wished
I was good at something. They are identical to my father’s
except for the left ring and pinkie that turned a ghostly
white after he sawed through some arteries in his wrist
right in our driveway. I can’t remember if I saw that happen
or if I placed myself there from the telling of the blood.
I was there, though, the time he wrapped his hands
around the neck of a shovel and whacked it over the head
of a German Shepherd that came barreling up the drive
to tear my flesh apart. I consider the moment I had my own
children, my hands reaching down to guide them out of my body
and into this world, already thinking I would kill for them.
Strangle whatever light, leave it muted on the pavement.
But I worry too much, the Hungarian psychic said
when she peered into my palms with a furrowed brow.
Said, you will live to be eighty, which is the age of my father
the last time I saw him alive.
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
Abecedarian for Sainthood
Amelia, the young girl I clean houses with,
bites her nails down to the skin,
comes to work on a bus from rehab.
Dusts around orange pill bottles she didn’t
expect to see there, pale moons calling out to her
from inside their powdered wells.
Grips the cross around her neck, whispers one
Hail Mary, clicks the mirrored door shut.
In her reflection, she is toothpaste streaked and
jaundiced. Inside her skull, a choir of
kettles wailing. She is a dog on a frayed
leash, chewing holes through her own
mouth, spitting blood into the porcelain. I am
no one and nothing to her, some old bitch.
Of course she reminds me of my brother, same
pain embroidered through her like a shared
quilt in a trap house. Same white knuckled
resolve. I thought I could be that kind of
sister again, Jesus walking on water, bulletproof
target, arms outstretched, a real Mother Teresa,
unconditional in my love, a savior,
vanquishing demons with the sheer will of my heart.
What difference did it make? Michael ended up
‘xactly where he was hell bent on going – into the open
yawn of a grave, my brother the
zealot, ruthless in his pursuit to end my sainthood.