October Hands

BY MARY ALICE DIXON

When I look at her hands, sweet crumbling

Carolina cracker, I see Amazon flesh under

lilac lacquer.

I see Appalachian raisin pie, hot knuckled

with nuts, kneaded with thumbs, tart old

purple plums.

When I touch my own hands they twist

to my mother’s silvered glass wrist

as she answers the song of brittling sky

dancing down Providence Road, to fly

where the path narrows to nothing, where

the shoulder ambushes the foot that dared

venture forth seeking I-85 north, where she

fell.

When I look at my palms I see my mother’s

October hands in me, tulip blood in winter skin,

broken heart that turned to tin, the day my

mother died.

When I look at my hands, hard laced to the bones

of her ladder back chair, I see my own fingers are

folding in prayer, bearing the arms of the woman

who carried them there, sweet Carolina cracker,

mystery of Amazon flesh, lilac lacquer.

---

Mary Alice Dixon lives in Charlotte, NC, where she volunteers with hospice. She has been an attorney and a professor of architectural history who taught in China, North Carolina, and Minnesota. Her recent work is in, or forthcoming from, Kakalak, Main Street Rag, Mythic Circle, Capsule Stories, That Southern Thing, County Lines, Stonecoast Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Passager's Pandemic Diaries, Pine Song Awards: 2021, and elsewhere.

Process Note: October Hands arose when an old friend asked me what I see in my hands. The answer became a poem for my mother, born in October, one hundred years ago. When I pick up my pen, I see my mother's fingerprints. When I finished the first draft of October Hands, I made a pie from one of my mother's favorite recipes. My kitchen was a mess but my pie was hot and nutty, which pretty much describes the way I write. For me, pies and poems come from the same place - hands that aren't afraid to make a mess.