WORKING WITH MY HANDS

Working with My Hands

My hands have aged the quickest,
nails short, cuticles torn, skin wrinkled,
from too many days in the sun

working on farms, in the Midwest,
in the South, even trying to grow food
in the desert during a seven-year drought.

I protected my hands from thorns,
shards of buried glass, but I loved
sinking my bare hands in the earth.

My fingertips grasped roots, yanked
weeds, touched the ridged back of pill bugs,
the soft bodies of earthworms.

Come harvest time, I pulled carrots
from the ground, cut the kale’s leaves,
picked the beans and prepared them for cooking

the way my mamaw taught me when we’d sit
on her porch a big pot in our laps and
snap beans in half, plucked off their ends.

I am not much of a gardener these days
but still, I crave using my hands,
building something out of the nothing,

I hold my pen, waiting for words
the way I once waited for the harvest.

Drink hope like water

a salvo sails past her ribs
out of her chest
an SOS from one self to another

the heaviest part of her
the part that wants

flung into the air

a protest a prayer

rush-hour, cars’ bumpers glinting
blazes of leaves
the color of embers
sweep down a blue sky

remember this

hands on the steering wheel

remember this

traffic blue sky autumn day
you are young enough
to wander into the woods
to rest on the pine needles

you are old enough
to know how lonely life is

The Monarch

I move my limbs, awaken
like that monarch in chrysalis
I watched one summer
when I was young and still
believed I’d have time
to be a mother before a crone—
oblong and light green, dangling
on a stem of milkweed
until her black spindly
legs emerged, bending like
elbows stuck in honey.

As she pumped wet crumpled
wings, I imagined the thousands
of miles she’d fly in a swarm
of orange to wait the winter out.

But I was wrong. She wouldn’t
be leaving. As a mid-summer
monarch, she’d be dead
by the time of the Harvest Moon.

April Tanka

The cold part of spring
drizzle in my hair, yellow
petals push through mud
not a riot of color
yet, just a promise of life

Still dark, yet birds sing.
Mist settles over the land
like grey smoke but Dawn
lifts her head with sleep-creased cheek
reminds me: be slow, go soft.

Rebecca Watkins holds an MFA in poetry and an MSed from the City University of New York. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Ginosko Literary Journal, the Quartet Journal, Hole in the Head Review, the Amethyst Review and the Amaranth Journal among other literary journals. Her creative nonfiction has been shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards. She is the author of Field Guide to Forgiveness (Finishing Line Press 2023) and Sometimes, in These Places (Unsolicited Press 2017). More of her work can be found at rebeccawatkinswriter.com.