Kayla King
Something You Called Sleight of Hand
At the end, I kept the nails long
for you. Now, perhaps, because of your leaving,
they linger and lean over the tips of fingers.
But the longer you’re gone,
the weaker they get; a metaphor
too morose to tell my mother tomorrow.
Sometimes they’re still good. The thumb nail is necessary
for digging into the skin of an orange at lunch.
Most would pick the zest free, but I leave it as a reminder
of marmalade mornings spent beneath sheets. I haven’t opened
that jar since, certain these nails would bend
back to breaking.
If anyone asked, I’d have to say the pointer nail is perfect
for eliminating the peel of my shoulder’s skin from the savagery
of sun last Sunday. Lifting the edges feels too much
like your parchment paper still stuck in that same drawer
in the kitchen. You must know it, because it’s the one
you promised to fix, but never did. You said we’d make
tracings of headstones for baby names.
You said so many things.
I tell them to myself daily,
and my mother hates the way I say you
like maybe she doesn’t understand
the way narration works in these kinds of poems.
Because she says it’s too difficult to find her way
into the house of a dead man. Ambiguity, she says,
is better left to those with lockjaw; they shouldn’t speak
anyway. She’ll never make it inside,
because she’s never been that kind of mother.
She scoffs at my hands instead of treating them
with tenderness, and maybe that says more
about her aversion to grieving than her ability
to mother me right.
Which next? Which—I think I lost
the thread. No matter, the middle one is meant for better
things. The way I’d center myself in a breath,
in a finger pressed between breasts to feel bone and beat
of blood. Why now should I surrender this sameness? What if
I burrowed deeper with this dagger of a nail until there was nowhere
else to go? I’ll ignore the chip in the paint there for this constant
constellating question. Because I don’t know how to be without
your hands here and there and you with your clinging claws
curved into crescents in the palm of my hand.
Those marks washed free, replaced
with soft, new skin soaking in the sink,
now clear of any dishes. These nail beds soften
beneath suds and the shores of somewhere else
where my pinky wrapped yours without words.
We stood in the ocean and willed the waves to give
us life again. But perhaps, we asked too much
of the old gods. Suppose they said sandblown,
like a spell sending that web of an ebb ever so slight
against your neck, dip down as if to kiss
the forgetting waters of Hell.
That pain of pulling memory from mind again
is all too familiar, but no, it’s not the same
as the sharp sting of nail break.
From the ring finger, of course. Such is the longest,
always and never existing all at once. But this is not that.
There’s no resurrecting anything after
the beginning.
for you. Now, perhaps, because of your leaving,
they linger and lean over the tips of fingers.
But the longer you’re gone,
the weaker they get; a metaphor
too morose to tell my mother tomorrow.
Sometimes they’re still good. The thumb nail is necessary
for digging into the skin of an orange at lunch.
Most would pick the zest free, but I leave it as a reminder
of marmalade mornings spent beneath sheets. I haven’t opened
that jar since, certain these nails would bend
back to breaking.
If anyone asked, I’d have to say the pointer nail is perfect
for eliminating the peel of my shoulder’s skin from the savagery
of sun last Sunday. Lifting the edges feels too much
like your parchment paper still stuck in that same drawer
in the kitchen. You must know it, because it’s the one
you promised to fix, but never did. You said we’d make
tracings of headstones for baby names.
You said so many things.
I tell them to myself daily,
and my mother hates the way I say you
like maybe she doesn’t understand
the way narration works in these kinds of poems.
Because she says it’s too difficult to find her way
into the house of a dead man. Ambiguity, she says,
is better left to those with lockjaw; they shouldn’t speak
anyway. She’ll never make it inside,
because she’s never been that kind of mother.
She scoffs at my hands instead of treating them
with tenderness, and maybe that says more
about her aversion to grieving than her ability
to mother me right.
Which next? Which—I think I lost
the thread. No matter, the middle one is meant for better
things. The way I’d center myself in a breath,
in a finger pressed between breasts to feel bone and beat
of blood. Why now should I surrender this sameness? What if
I burrowed deeper with this dagger of a nail until there was nowhere
else to go? I’ll ignore the chip in the paint there for this constant
constellating question. Because I don’t know how to be without
your hands here and there and you with your clinging claws
curved into crescents in the palm of my hand.
Those marks washed free, replaced
with soft, new skin soaking in the sink,
now clear of any dishes. These nail beds soften
beneath suds and the shores of somewhere else
where my pinky wrapped yours without words.
We stood in the ocean and willed the waves to give
us life again. But perhaps, we asked too much
of the old gods. Suppose they said sandblown,
like a spell sending that web of an ebb ever so slight
against your neck, dip down as if to kiss
the forgetting waters of Hell.
That pain of pulling memory from mind again
is all too familiar, but no, it’s not the same
as the sharp sting of nail break.
From the ring finger, of course. Such is the longest,
always and never existing all at once. But this is not that.
There’s no resurrecting anything after
the beginning.
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