Our Hands As Trails

I am a ghost of you are a ghost of me.

● Your hands sculpt a bowl & fill it with food: little machines singing in bronze,
little statues, & what stretches between (our?) hands is:

○ Fog dissolving through single paned glass & I, waiting for the lights of the
bus in the season’s second rain.
○ Rivers, fictional.
○ A route (you) hiked once & how once didn’t matter in the face of:

■ (your) blisters.
■ (my) trails, tracks, backwoods, beaten paths & fabric stitched &
speaking in tongues.
■ (our) held hands, agents of dissolving:

● Forests, fictional (though that has only just come to pass.)
● Work, for the sake of the after hours, a sweet-tooth sort of
revenge.
● Negative space, because you looked at me too long & I
fidgeted with the fabric in my hands & foundered for
something to say. & as the fabric unskeined I ascribed it
made-up words:

○ Bespoke.
○ Left untranslated, so unspoken.
○ & like a river I followed the trace sediments of our
language

● until it lost itself below the earth.
● & I hold fast the edges of the fabric till it becomes:

■ a poem as food
■ as eating
■ as standing over a flame until:

○ smoke comes to shade our fire’s aftermath.
○ a conversation occurs in stove in burner in hearth in harvest. Saying:
○ how hands hold & hold fast.

● Your hands sculpt a bowl & fill it with all these things & all to say:

I am a ghost of you are a ghost of me.

— Zadie McGrath