My Mother’s Hands

By Eleanor Kedney

Issue 47 • Spring 2023 • Poetry

I never thought of them as slight, though her fingers were long
and thin. They were working hands—peeling five pounds of
potatoes for potato pancakes, starching a shirt, handing my tired
father a glass of milk, or hanging sheets on the pulley line fastened
out our second-floor window to an oak tree across the yard. Her
knuckles grew knobs with age, and the thickened cord in her right
palm tethered her ring and pinky finger inward to permanent
unrest. I only held her hand as a child, and then again when she
was dying. Those were the two times I was afraid to let go.

Over the years, it was my nimble index fingers and thumbs that
cleaned her hearing aids, sorted medications into day-of-the-week
pillboxes, and tied the laces on her sneakers. Once, lying in the
sunroom together on a twin bed, she reached her arm across my
body, and feeling its weight, I pulled away. Touch was a chasm
between us, and that moment she cried pries into my memory
today, bookended by her lying in a hospital bed and not getting
well. I climbed in, circled both arms around her back, held her
chest to mine. Her hands smoothed my long brown hair she loved
to unknot and curl into kielbasa ringlets when I was a girl. It was
eight days before I washed it. I was no longer a daughter.

Eleanor Kedney

Eleanor Kedney is the author of Between the Earth and Sky (C&R Press, 2020), a finalist for the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards and the 2020 Best Book Awards, and the chapbook The Offering (Liquid Light Press, 2016). An award-winning poet, her work has been published in various journals, magazines, and anthologies. She is the founder of the Tucson branch of the New York-based Writers Studio and served as the director for ten years. Kedney teaches “Writing Toward Forgiveness” workshops based on craft techniques utilized in her books. She joined the board of the Tucson Poetry Festival in 2021. www.eleanorkedney.com.

Jack Bordnick

My sculptures and photography incorporate surrealistic, mythological and magical imagery often with whimsical overtones — aimed at provoking our experiences and self reflections. Aiming to unbalance our rational minds, the predominant imagery deals mostly with facial expressions of both living and “non-living” beings, and things that speak to us in their own languages. They are mixed media assemblages that have been assembled, disassembled and reassembled, becoming abstractions unto themselves. I am an Industrial design graduate of Pratt Institute in New York.