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- These Hands, If Not Gods
- By Natalie Diaz
- Haven’t they moved like rivers—
- like Glory, like light—
- over the seven days of your body?
- And wasn’t that good?
- Them at your hips—
- isn’t this what God felt when he pressed together
- the first Beloved: Everything.
- Fever. Vapor. Atman. Pulsus. Finally,
- a sin worth hurting for. Finally, a sweet, a
- You are mine.
- It is hard not to have faith in this:
- from the blue-brown clay of night
- these two potters crushed and smoothed you
- into being—grind, then curve—built your form up—
- atlas of bone, fields of muscle,
- one breast a fig tree, the other a nightingale,
- both Morning and Evening.
- O, the beautiful making they do—
- of trigger and carve, suffering and stars—
- Aren’t they, too, the dark carpenters
- of your small church? Have they not burned
- on the altar of your belly, eaten the bread
- of your thighs, broke you to wine, to ichor,
- to nectareous feast?
- Haven’t they riveted your wrists, haven’t they
- had you at your knees?
- And when these hands touched your throat,
- showed you how to take the apple and the rib,
- how to slip a thumb into your mouth and taste it all,
- didn’t you sing out their ninety-nine names—
- Zahir, Aleph, Hands-time-seven,
- Sphinx, Leonids, locomotura,
- Rubidium, August, and September—
- And when you cried out, O, Prometheans,
- didn’t they bring fire?
- These hands, if not gods, then why
- when you have come to me, and I have returned you
- to that from which you came—bright mud, mineral-salt—
- why then do you whisper O, my Hecatonchire. My Centimani.
- My hundred-handed one?
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