My mama’s hands

can hold eight eggs 
when she walks from the 
refrigerator to the stove, 
bacon fat popping out 
of the black skillet. 
Her hands can work 
their way around carrots, 
feeling through the earth 
for the ripest ones. 
They can pluck tomato bugs off 
of sticky leaves and 
fling them in the high grass. 

My mama’s hands 
can rub the knots out of my 
daddy’s shoulders 
as he sits on the bottom step 
of the wooden front porch, 
his hands clasped between 
his workboots, him saying 
mmhmm, mmhmm 
to the rhythm of her hands 
rubbing away his day. 

My mama’s hands 
pick cotton and plums 
and pull feathers off chickens 
and wrap babies in blankets 
and pick flowers that she 
arranges in old pop bottles.

On Sunday 
my mama’s hands lay 
folded on her lap. 
“Too wrinkled and ugly,” she says,
“but they work.” 
So she keeps them together,
each protecting the other. 

But she’ll forget. 
And I’ll feel her arm, 
cool across the back of my neck.
Her hands will rub my shoulder
and finger the lace she sewed
on my Sunday dress. 

If I sit real still, 
she will smooth my hair, 
her roughened fingers sometimes
catching.