Piano Hands

I don’t know what I owe my fingers, or what they owe me

I rest on the keys,
Terrified to play. I’m scared of the sounds we make from our hands.
I wonder, perhaps, just what it is to create.

Our words are unbeknownst to the dictionaries that make up the way we speak
they are the ways we tell ourselves we can’t
they are in colour
They are loud
They are underneath our feet

When I sweat
Poetry drips down my face and into my eyes
And I let it find anyway to swim in my blood and fill me with any kind of grace it hopes toWe bathe in the mess we’ve made
And somehow it makes us clean.

I wonder about how long it takes to forget
A voice
And how we steal snippets of the way people think until we begin to think
A bit like them and then
I wonder if we put all our weight on our two hands, taking for granted what it is to crawl.

Wondering if I’d press pause or rewind or play on months at a time if I knew whether the sun would be out or what October would come to mean.
That truth is just different shades of the same color every year,
One moon in front of another.

Everything is just till death or dinner do us part
And I try so desperately to recall what Broadway felt like
When I was young

Or why I can’t listen to certain songs anymore
Or why we can reshuffle the cards
But don’t get to choose the ones we’ve got.

I used to page through library books with these hands
The sticky covers, the torn pages, the lost and tired and returned.
How many hands has this story been held in? How many tears has it caught—How’d it find its way to me?

I used to never go outside for recess
To play four square or do ten-year-old things
Instead I’d sit in the library to write stories by myself.
My fingers languid on the faded keyboard,
A different kind of keys my hands relaxing into every syllable—
I printed out half-finished stories and pressed them into my backpack.
My hands have felt cheeks and arms for the first, second, last time
They’ve pressed makeup into blemishes
Hoping to cover up mistakes.
They’ve held hearts and and pumpkins and chocolate-covered somethings
My mother sends me mittens in the mail, they arrive at my doorstep because
she wants to hold my hands.
I collect them and they never see any light or snow.
I wonder if she’ll send me any this year.

I figure if the air smells like people I used to know I should just assume
Seasons are changing
In the streets and in my legs
When my brain won’t turn off oron
It all begins from the same pulse in my chest.

And when I look at my hands
I notice yesterday and last month and last year in gold and silver and freckle
And I think of someplace else, not you or them or anyone And my fingers begin to shake when I reach out again, in another year, in another life.


Chilly

Today I saw through the trees that it’ll be October soon
And with every exhale of hot air, rising beyond neighbour’s crumbling chimneys
We fall away from last Saturday spent anxious that we’ll walk in the room and lock eyes with the wrong version of who we are, and farther from our 16th birthday parties and the last time we cried so
Put your lips to the back of this
Not yet sealed envelope
And find some tree bark worthy of name carving.
And then we’ll lie to everyone we’ve ever met or just our mothers and say we’re always making the right choice
Or we’ll never compromise ourselves so we can make mistakes that lead us to—
Who are you?
Scented paper notebooks and
trading words
We taste like the end of a sentence that could end up walking you home or saying goodnight
At a time where darkness
Can’t even tell us where she goes.

I’ll always hear that you like my eyes
But shatter the glass and look past
This shade of yellow that has no name
And hope that the world we see is the same watercolour painting
And the same breakfast order
And the same side of the pillow.

I hope you slept well last night
I hope the air smells like a 5 AM bagel
out your half-cracked window, in Detroit or New York or maybe even Paris and
When you’re somewhere between a dream and daily medication I hope your mind wanders to the soil and grows out of the earth. Steered by the seasons changing we decide to
Sit outside for a few more moments
Or recognise there’s no finality in just saying yes
And from the expression on a face
We’ll choose to stay for one last song near by a stranger, leaning against the wall.

And I know it, because I saw it in a dream, that you’ll eat the best ice cream of your life in their hometown, or I hope you do,
And on a drive to dinner they’ll relay
Every single day of the first ten years of their life.
All of our goodness is still to come.

And yet
We wish to bottle it all up—
The past and the present,
A planetarium held hostage a
Version of the sky and it’s closer to our eyelashes, Mercury is, so, we wonder In the fuzzy dark
We tell a joke to the person whose hands we brush and
Laughter cracks open the fresh cut grass under our feet and the multitudes
Of listless bodies
Fighting insomnia on this purple Monday
Kiss our eyelids and tangle their fingers in our hair until we fall asleep.


Should we write a poem?

It’s almost morning.
the sky looks like it’s been holding its breath to wait for us to make up our minds.
Should we go watch the sunrise?
And look at each other with half-tired half-drunk eyes telling stories
Should we make porch swing coffee and erase the after taste of red wine or should
we just close our eyes and dream about what we ordered
At 7 am on our way to high school or
The people you only see after dark who maybe, just like the stars or
The music we listen to when we’re packing your things in boxes to go away —
There’s half of someone’s leftovers in the fridge at home— what you know you shouldn’t take,
Your brother is saving it for whenever he finds his way back
but you take it anywayHe won’t be so upset, it’s just his favourite food, and he loves you.

What are the candies your mom puts out in bowl
When you come home?
What feels different when your bare feet find stability on the familiar floorboards —
How do we qualify a feeling we can’t even colour—
coming back home
And what does returning mean, then, for me.

Its all the same River water tripping stones to fall like seasons over one another
until until until
All the ocean is made from the same wave.
The beauty is, you’ll stand on soft moss with water rushing under your toes as a mouth opens in an “O” and swallows you whole—
All the magic places are warm.
Or maybe it’s just all the holy people.
But ski lodges, movie theatre popcorn and my favourite cousin all savour the same type of heat.
It’s that prick you feel behind your eyelids when someone says a few words
That could be a poem behind your lips that you’ll speak out loud Looking out a train window
While the unfamiliar streets begin to look like a painting.
Why are we so afraid of changing?
It’s the letter in your hands
Heavy with pen ink
From someone far away who wanted to write you to say, in some fond tongue,
I’ll always know you.

Sometimes I’ll be so very cold, my hands will be, much too cold to play piano but I’ll have
A furnace in my chest
And the coals come from the
Words which wrestle with blood.

The frigid cold comes because people inhabit us
And they claim stake on our hearts and it’s impossible to evict them—
Until we choose to move back into our own bones, one day,
through the guise of hazy two-toned poems that barely make sense but in between the lines sound like the melody of a song we heard once We trip over our own some days and somebodies until we walk in a straight line,
And we don’t even cut corners
And our feet barely leave the ground.

Does it have to do with PH or chemistry or love—
That November is truly the warmest month
Dressed in wool and chai tea or
That I’ll never leave a place with
leaves the same colour as my best friend’s hair and
Maybe it’s enough to hear your name spoken by someone who used to be no one and
Sometimes you’ll be reminded that you’re a whole entire being, no matter how many years we spend on these streets—
So just remember— please, remember.