Poetry

My hands

by Ella Felber

My hands are writing, crafting, caring, touching, picking apples… reaching for my ancestors’ hands. For the ones who sit with me, and for the ones who sit with me in absence. Some of them I’ve never met, some of them left pain for me. Pain only becomes visible when we voice it, or cry. It’s much easier for me to recognise pain, when I have a visible mark or —

— Sometimes it feels so good to turn the page. To imagine something else, despite the previous lines shining through. Like the absence of the aunt I never met. What if she would have been just as strange to me as the rest of the village is?

My landscape holds ample discontinuities,
I could turn a page in

Appeared in Issue Fall '23