By Damon McLaughlin

If I were taking lives, I would take hands
first, parting the bones of the wrist with one
good snap, and they'd pop off
like spent hibiscus buds, the fingers
and the palms collapsed like paper cups
no mouth has touched in years. I would

palm each palm, opening the hand
little finger first, slowly,
as though talking down a fist.

And then I'd pry the thumb,
that fleshy horse, to stroke its velvet nose
so soft it's silk, it's air, a ghost touched and rising
from the sheet that binds it to the world

the way these lines traverse the hand
mapping heart and love and life and how
we will hold on to such promises

though they spin like leaves all around us
and dodge the grips of scientists and priests
who held them in their bibles,

and the blues man's fingertips, cuticles
picked at by guitar strings, calluses hard
as the mechanic's or the farmer's
whose hands swell with years of milking,
of laying the fence that binds him to the land
 
and one to another, earth, sea, and sky.
I would hold up these hands and pray for rain.
I would hold them up like bowls and fonts,
like reservoirs the clouds have filled
for us to swim in, to lose, to find ourselves.
I would offer them like flowers for the living
and the dead, for the handful of earth between.