TWO POEMS

Trypophobia and Ars Poetica

To soothe a backache, my ex would dip a silver quarter in camphor, pull it
across my shoulders until the skin bruised in stinging streaks. Scraping

wind, she called it. I remembered the ritual when I fleshed a boy-goat’s hide, scraping
fat off the creature’s warm skin, hung across a log, surrounded by a flock

of human hands with hooked knives digging at it before sinews went stiff in the winter
wind. I took my blade to it, felt my own back hum with memories of its purpled

plumes of burst blood vessels. It’s hard to prepare a hide for salting without tearing
a few holes in it. Someone has a name for the irrational fear of holes, estimating

sixteen percent of us have it. Certainly this population excludes cephalopod specialists
treasuring the soft, numerous suckers of squids, or the architecture scholar

who did her dissertation on windows, or any child who has spent an afternoon
amputating seeds from the cartilage of a pomegranate, whose red hands traced

the cratered husk before devouring the pile of rubies. I think I may have
the opposite phobia: the irrational suspicion of wholeness. I am bewildered

by rituals, texts, artifacts. How in the hell does anything make it here
whole? “Holy,” my grandmother said, tugging the ratty wool socks

slipping off my tiny toes. This is the first joke I can remember, maybe
that makes it the first poem. All I need to know now is that every animal

has the exact right amount of brain required to tan its own hide.

The Day the World is Born

This morning, dew chandeliers every smiling blade
of grass, on every sleeping lawn and fallowed field.

This has already happened every morning for the entire
past year. And probably every dawn of every year before

that. How long have water molecules clung to each other
like sequins sewn into silk? Whether we noticed them

or not. Most miracles do not formally belong
to a congregation. This morning, the curtain is bandage-thin

between the worlds. Once, there was nothing
but heaven. Once, the shimmering void was

unavoidable. This morning, heaven remembers
the earth, remembers us. Heaven gave us everything:

roses, dimples, salt, wetness, wool,
mothers, butter, murder. We share a home with every wound

and every shelter that has grazed our failing
hands. Our hands cannot carry what we need

to become. This year, if we want to transform,
we will drop everything now. We will wield

the emptiness that knows only of its endlessness.
We will count the glitters of dew as they leave

each other, becoming separate once again.
Here is the way to start again: let heaven

slither in through the holes this year
left in you. Everything you’ve lost is enough

space for your wholeness to return into. Every day
is someone’s birthday. Today is everything’s

birth day. We’re all here together: holding our breath
in the delivery room. We’re tugging at the curtain,

eager to catch it all in our tired and wild arms.

________

Shelby Handler is a writer, organizer and educator living on Duwamish territory/Seattle, WA. They are a 2019-2020 Richard Hugo House fellow and MFA candidate at the University of Washington. A finalist of Palette Poetry’s Emerging Poet Prize, recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Sugar House Review, The Journal, among others. Shelby is a founding member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Artists and Cultural Workers Council. Follow them @shelbeleh.