Hands

He says, “I like your hands.”

So I chop them off at the wrists.

Soon enough, there’s blood all over the place

but the good news is we’re standing in front

of a bunch of paper so the blots begin

to take shape.

This here is the memory of a trip

to the playground where the river

was humming and we made it home

safely.

I have been thinking about my mom a lot.

I have been thinking about trip switches and fail-safes.

I have been thinking about how he said,

And they stopped knowing what to do, other than

chase words and flip pages, scroll, doom-scroll,

genuinely consider the value of alarm clocks.

This here, is time.