The Genealogist Catalogues Every Living Hand

by Noel Tague

“How Much Do You See” by Rebecca Anderson

Grandmother’s hands leaping     from a blue sweater

hands balled at hips, hands loose        around carnations 

silver-tinted hands gripping     a wicker pram, hands crossed

at shirtwaists, hands vanishing     from the ends of sepia sleeves—

Where are the hands 

that held me as a baby, that cupped      my oak-apple fists?

The hands that cared for my body

before it knew how to do anything but breathe?

Nameless the hands      shimmering on tin, floating

hands upon hands upon hands     uncanny meetings

of double exposures

                                         the baby of me receding 

                                                                       behind night mists

as I become the living record

for my own baby—

(I can’t do this anymore    I cried     doubling     I can’t—

Impossible that my body 

could be passage        for another body—

and who will remember me as I was then?      Where are the hands

that reached for me as I fell?     O gulls      vanishing       

in the fog—       Cousins’ chubby hands gripping

playpen bars, handlebars, dogs’ tails, 

hands        leading the arm into shadow

O terns     bright needles plunging in and out—

The baby of me going out     like a light—

sisters’ hands caught mid-gesture     

in sharp flight between words     hands crossed

at waists, hands       of Civil War wives 

resting on husbands’ shoulders     hands clasped 

on upside-down parasols, hands       holding babies

sometimes lovingly, sometimes wanting        to fly off elsewhere

Look at the hands holding everything 

together:      riots of children, bodies         unraveling in old age

these long nights perched on the threshold

of death       waiting to see what illness will do

O tatted fog       shrinking the light—

Finally with my hands I pulled           him out of me

He slid into the world      fingers splayed

compassing the breach

Rebecca Anderson is a writer, visual artist, and mental health clinician who works and writes from a small farm in central Maine. She is an MFA candidate at Mississippi University for Women's low-residency creative writing program where she is a poetry editor for Ponder Review. She was nominated for Best American Short Stories 2019 and has had recent work featured (or forthcoming) in Waxing & Waning, Passengers Journal, Bacopa Literary Review Review, and Jokes Review. Instagram: @rebeccatellsstories

Noel Thistle Tague is on the English faculty at the University of Maine at Augusta, where she teaches writing and rhetoric and is the faculty advisor for UMA's first undergraduate literary magazine, Specter Moose. She is working on a collection of poems inspired by a steamer trunk of ephemera encompassing six generations of women in her family. Originally from the Thousand Islands region of northern New York State, she now lives up the street from a shipyard in midcoast Maine with her family.