I look down at my hands sometimes and I don’t see mine
I see my mother’s
her swollen, calloused knuckles and confusing nail polish
It’s chipped, but it’s also
as if
she’s forgotten to paint the polish on
every other nail
or sometimes, each one a different color but
always one left bare
I think she gets distracted and forgets or
begets to anxiousness that causes her body
to rock back in a forth in a ball and
my hands, though small,
reach out to touch her
She wears chunky black doc martens and cropped jean jackets that
she found at the goodwill in North Portland
by the harbor where her boat indiscriminately floats and
mama the chihuahua waits for her
shaking in the arms of her arsonist boyfriend
I saw her yesterday and her nails were looking especially rough
I don’t mind a chipped nail to elude the essence of
an edgy life but her fingers were black with
engine oil from fixing her boat before
returning to land to care for her friend who
had a stroke, you see he’s paralyzed on the left side of his body and
I’m slowly losing my empathy, thinking
it feels like you’ve got more time for the
people you find on the streets than
you do for me but hey
we’ve all got our chosen family
She places chunks of chile verde in a tortilla at lunch
and I wonder where those fingers have been
not out of disgust but more so
that she’s far from veritable repetition
and it shows on the maps that color
her hands
And me
I’ve always got a bottle of lotion in my bag because
I don’t like the feeling of dryness
just like uncle JR who
had obsessive compulsive disorder and
was afraid to touch napkins
and despite our fears of feeling too much
these hands are chopping garlic and
writing soliloquies with heavy pens made by
old men at Oregon Country Fair and
my hands like to touch you
to feel the roughness on my gentle innocence
to convene with what you left me after
all the things I didn’t want to see
those hands to make up for the alcohol in your coffee and
Eric’s bald head and man
his knuckles must be tough too
after breaking down the bathroom door to get to you
shards of that precious dead tree flying toward
mommy and me
and the only way we’d feel alright was to
get in the car
very late at night and
play Hands by Jewel,
she’d sing “my hands are small, I know,
but they’re not yours, they are my own
and we are never broken.”
we
are
never
broken
Not like the bathroom door or
your soreness from rocking back and forth and
Back at lunch today
Chunks of Chile verde slip from the tortilla
my hands instinctively reach out to catch them
along with all the broken pieces of wood and
nail polish bottles and
while I swallow
I wonder which color she’ll choose
tomorrow