We hold poems
Like tiny hands,
Reaching up to pull God down,
One hand after the other,
Endlessly
Grasping,
Glorifying our existence
By shaming our downfall.

Yet, these hands do not see the hand that
Dismisses,
The hand that points outward within,
The hand whose mercy
Must be fear,
Putting us in our place
As definite and temporal,
As the scrubbers of his golden feet,
Shinier with each polishing.

Trembling before him
I tug at his robe
Begging him not to let me fall,
For surely at this height I will fall straight
Through.

We were all born crying,
And sometimes I think that even our tiny bodies could already feel the pressure of an unfair world.
A world where women’s bodies are a prize to be won or an object to rank.
A world where people obey the sign in the museum that says “Do Not Touch”,
And those same people decide that it’s a suggestion when a woman says “Do not touch”

Hands on my body before my first period.
Not sweet hands like sweet caroline.
Before, evil was something I used to look for in Disney villains, now, it’s eyes are everywhere, glued to my 17 year old body.
It’s in my neighborhood, in my coffee shop, in my bed. It whispers me shakespearean sonnets and tells me I’m ****.
Runs its fingers up and down my spine, zig zagging over the bone. Its kisses are soft and gentle, like springtime. It makes me feel important and deserving.
Then the sonnets turn from Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth, and It tells me:

****** thou art; ****** will be thy end.

Touching hands, not sweet hands.
Hard, cold, unloving, cigarette stained hands.
Cold hands on my beautiful body, my spectacular self.
I call out to nothing, and nothing responds.
I sink deeper into the bed, wanting time to stop, fast forward, or rewind or something.
I wait for the sonnets to end, and the pain to go away.
I wait for grass to grow and paint to dry.
And then it stops

and I am not me.

here's to you, my love:

here’s to your hair,
        the soft, soft strands on your head, light brown and golden
        in bright light,
        in my hands, stroking and detangling until your heartbeat
           steadies.
here’s to your eyes,
        hazel, streaked with green in your right, speckled with green in
            your left,
        kind,
        soulful, charming, comfortable, i cannot look away.
here’s to your nose,
        red in the cold,
        warm and soft when you rub it against mine,
        and we laugh and i brush my thumb against your cheek.
here’s to your lips,
        the first lips that have met mine, delicate yet titillating,
        curving into a smile from your hairline to your chin,
        i could draw it in my sleep.
here’s to your shoulders,
        broad and muscular and made to fit my head perfectly,
        carrying the weight of the world, the burdens of your heart,
        the things i’ve left room on my shoulders to carry with you.
here’s to your chest,
        resembling sculpted marble under the hands of Michelangelo,
        caging a heart of honey and sweet water and sunshine and
            sunshine and sunshine,
        steady under the palm of my hand.
here’s to your hands,
        the scars and calluses, the story of you,
        the things they create, bright and beautiful and true,
        the way they feel on the small of my back, holding the pieces of
            me together.
here’s to us,
        and the simple fact that out of a hundred billion galaxies,
        two hundred thousand years of humanity,
        and seven and a half billion beating hearts,
        mine and yours intertwined in the way that they did.

shovels
too big for delicate iPhone keypads
paws for digging in the dirt
rough stumpy fingers
bloodied with cuts and cracks
calloused through manual labour
working in the winter cold

but sometimes

they can produce beauty
a little light
some magic
to compensate for their ugliness