Ricki Hunsinger is an assistant librarian from Baltimore and a graduate with a B.A. in English from Chatham University. 

Glovespeak

I gripped firmly and shook hands

with the language of his glove.

It speaks to the hand it suits.

Fingertips emerge

in the summer;

those fingertips unsheathe

like the pink parts of dogs.

For one who feels too much,

the glove is a blanket to silence

the anger residing within the knuckles. 

Rejecting the suffocating

envelope of complete touch;

the glove is a mask

to blind the eye of the palm.

With no visible lines to label,

his fortune cannot be read. 

The print left by his hand

is a series of spirals,

never a solid pressing—

the animal, untraceable.

From Ground Back to Sky Again

The normal life slips out from under me

with just a few words from my doctor.

I undress my former guise—

she’s just an amateur actress

who refuses to think in screams.

Mother drags me from the car into the yard.  A woman rushes

out of her house; finds me sprawled

like a child making snow angels. 

My legs are empty in my pants; my uterus

lives somewhere rented by another tenant

—a telling bump incapable of speaking.

Gray drops of heavy rain fall cold

on my forehead from way up high;

so high that a silver string from my

navel connects them

from ground back to sky again. 

I follow them to where I might

be able to find you.

The circle of pine trees look down

with proud sorrow;

the wounded eying their scars. 

Their lack of conversation is proof

of what they know,

and they might be angels. 

Their dialogue prompts me.

I can truly say now

that I am sorry,

with more conviction

than I feel when I write

my own first and last name,

and that is something I have been doing

since I have been able to hold a pen. 

Naked Like a Tree

Smiling in the cold breath of December, everything is dripping.  The snow-water wets our pants near the ankles and travels up, heavy and damp like disease.  Like thirsty roots.  But I’m naked like a tree, and I think of you when I peel the skin from my fingers, astonished at the shiny thin-skin layer protecting the inner flesh.

My fingers make men cry like onions.  He stands with a knife in hand, sobbing at the discovery of his own center.  And he arrives with nothing but his ordinary self and the sadness of an uncooperative organ, shaking his head in disbelief in the midst of a twisted plot carried out by the cutting board.  And I’m open and have been.  Suddenly he can’t remember anything but the imaginary confessions of my love for him, which he’s assigned to me.  With each word I harden.

He loves me crazy and strips my bark, searching for worms to feed on; pecking a hole to build a home.  I don’t think of him when I am in the checkout line, or reading a book by the light of the bedside lamp; when I’m deciding what sweater to wear, or whether or not it’s excessive to use perfumed soap with a scented deodorant.  There is only the absence of leaves, the ghost of his voice, the stark, callous nudity I’ve cut open inside him.