by Rita Maria Martinez
These hands ache from composing.
These hands are imperfect and arthritic.
These hands are dipped in hot paraffin wax.
These hands soak in pools of ice water.
Right now they seek warmth in the pockets
of my jeans. Sandwiched between
someone else’s hands they seek shelter.
They explore. They dive into fleecy banks of hair.
They have a masochistic desire to return
to Sister Joyce’s sixth-grade English class
jotting what seemed like worthless vocab,
ink spilling from a Bic like bird droppings.
These hands want to inscribe the name
of my first love across the sole of my shoes,
to pry his mouth open and graffiti his tongue.
These are praying hands. These are worshipping hands.
They skim the smooth surface of rosary beads before bed.
These are working hands. These are writing hands.
They enjoy the luxury of a thick pen with cushy padding
where thumb, index and middle finger rest.
These hands produce squiggles burdened by meaning,
as there’s meaning in each small hand that stopped growing
after middle school, each ring finger measuring
a meager 4.5, same size as Abuela Gloria’s withered
hands inside the coffin at Rivero Funeral Home
where a thoughtless mortician wrapped a plastic rosary
around her dead digits instead of the family approved one
from Spain that smelled of roses. I almost screamed
when Mami tried to swap rosaries and untangle the stubborn
string of cheap beads that clung to Abuela’s wrinkled hands
the way the wrinkled roots of the orchid adhered
to the bark of her avocado tree, like a needy lover.
The first poem I wrote was about Gloria’s bulging
nose and wild gray hair giving the impression
she was a witch as she drew in her white notepad,
fruit trees branching from her hands as words branch
from mine, hatch from a discomforting feeling
akin to butterflies, which prompts me to stare at my hands,
fumbling hands that can’t catch a football or open
wine bottles, struggling hands, forgetful hands that lose
car keys, misplace eye glasses somewhere in the house,
beneath the bed perhaps, and it’s just a question of time
before I find them, before I spot the elusive snakeskin
silver clutch, the riddle of sentences revolving in my head,
parts of speech kickboxing past clutter and dust,
words discovered in an old letter I found rummaging
for postage stamps in my father’s desk: I want to pass
the G.E.D. to make my twelve-year-old daughter proud.
Papi wanted to become an agronomist, but repaired
typewriters and vacuums at Sears for thirty-five years.
Washing dishes was his first Miami job. I’ve contemplated
how soap suds felt between his fingers on forsaken stacks
of china as the moon bathed the restaurant with its fractured light.
He now owns a pool maintenance business.
While typing I smell the chlorine on my father’s hands,
disinfectant on mother’s as she clutches a paper towel
to clean the kitchen counter and anything else
because her cleaning, like my writing, is compulsive,
because she dusts to extract sense from a senseless world,
because she is sixty and set in her ways,
though I’d like to see her kneeling in the garden,
dirt trapped beneath fingernails where it belongs,
soil smudged across those hands that pinched
my side and ears, parted and braided hair,
tied shoelaces and held my own,
hands that stroked her swollen belly
before I was born.
*This poem was a semi-finalist in the SWWIM For-the-Fun-of-It Contest.
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