Maria Giesbrecht (she/her) is a Canadian poet whose writings explore her Mexican roots. Her work has previously been published in ONLY POEMS, Queen’s Quarterly, Hobart, Contemporary Verse 2, and elsewhere and is forthcoming in the Literary Review of Canada. Maria is the founder of the writing table, Gather, and spends her days nurturing creative folks to write urgently.
“This poem is an ekphrastic poem inspired by Salman Toor’s painting Bar Boy (2019).”
As my grandfather once said:
if you wear gloves
you can touch anything.
My hands are warm
inside the orange
mittens—I juggle
the hurt of the world,
sharp like a single fish
scale and the hope,
pigmented like boiled
mulberries.
I am just pretending
to have fun
but I actually hate it
when my two hands
grow into wooden bridges
deep like dark beer
and a child tries to cross
in the middle of the night
but I’m sleeping.
