“Unremembered Skies and Snows” by Meredith Boe
Your hands have always looked too big to hold those meek potatoes. Fingernails peeling and callouses dirt crusted, you hand me a bag of freshly plucked reds and yellows, caked in mud that I’ll wash off later in my Chicago kitchen sink. I still have never seen you happier than when you aren’t driving your truck and can tend to vegetables.
Your hands have been gripped around more Bud Lights than all the plastic six-pack yokes in the ocean, and in cuffs on occasion. They’ve yanked a decaying tooth, no doubt. Long ago carried candles as an altar boy. Shoveled snow gloveless in the dark morning hours, just as the cows begin to stir in the field beyond the barn. Just as distant suns unwillingly fade, yielding to light.
Read the rest in the Chicago Reader here.
