well...it's scorpio season again. yay!! so once again I'm offering up a poem to the dead that reaches for the rest of us living folk....
Generating
I’ve got my grandmothers fingers
thin and long
weirdly strong and almost always cold
my time with her was her cancer years
just into her forties
she dyed her hair pitch black
painted her lips a blood crimson
never smiled because her teeth were bad
I remember a stern face
a buried distress
her bones rising to the surface
I remember thin
then nothing
she was diagnosed when I was two
I was seven when she died
and here I am with her fingers
her cancer hands
were the hands I knew
with her fingers I make
as many beautiful things as I can
she haunts me with her stubborn self destruction
she haunts me with her grief hard beauty
my hands feel my breast free ribcage and sternum
where all the complexities
of self love and survival converge
her hands played the banjo
her hands cradled endless cigarettes
her hands
didn’t touch me
I’m learning to touch people with intent
as I would touch animals and plants
with ease and open need
Its hard to remember that it’s important
human touch
as important as making beautiful things
as important as inhabiting
ourselves
as important as illness
that thrusts impermanence at us
with all the pain of change
with all the beautiful things that bloom and wilt
and bloom again
it is the poison
it is unwanted touch
it is the hard cold and weirdly strong world
that moves to break us
and so we smoke strum paint and die
we inherit bones and grief
we make do
make hard choices
lean into pained beauty
pass everything on
we make things grow
and neglect them
and sometimes they grow anyway
![]()
in memory of Gladys Fink-Ambrose
![]()
