I tell my friends their fingers look like spider legs.
Their eyes are dark, too. Some of them remember scraping
the salt off my skin when I tried to find myself

under the shadow of my own tongue, my cracked palms.
I told a man to write an ode to his lover’s hands,
make it as intimate as he wanted,

not to share it with anyone, and I think about
the art he chokes and refuses to touch.
In the mall, my friend tells me she loved a me

who was not my color, her hand in mine, in my other hand
an alert for our reservation. Across our bodies hangs
a poster from Tiffany’s, two rings too white

to be real in anyone’s future. Despite myself,
my hands become softer with love—
my man is a cook and I like the way his hands pick knives

and slice things open. I like holding you down, he says.
My friend says, You know when you’re almost finished
trapping a poem and you question your whole life?

We talk about other people’s hands, grasping small vessels.
We talk about Jesus’s hands, blessings lighting up the night.
Our mothers are religious when it’s convenient:

I believe in ghosts and I do not believe in ghosts,
the hands genuflecting mold in the corners of my eyes.
On Sunday, I ask my mother where the palms came from,

and she says, From trees, Terese, and I know I can’t trust
anyone anymore. I can’t grasp a cactus for fun, hit send
then unsend on a slap. I can’t strangle myself to death.

Terese Mason Pierre is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Walrus, The Puritan, Quill & Quire, and Fantasy Magazine, among others. Her poetry has been nominated for the Ignyte Award, the Rhysling Award, and Best of the Net. She is the co-Editor-in-Chief of Augur Magazine, a Canadian speculative literature journal. Terese has also co-hosted poetry reading series, organized literary events, and facilitated creative writing workshops. She is the author of chapbooks, Surface Area (Anstruther Press, 2019) and Manifest (Gap Riot Press, 2020). Terese lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Image by Polina Kuzovkova @p_kuzovkova