The hand was hungry,
could eat none of small
creek animals, could not
catch the slippery catfish.
The fiddler crabs knew it
human no more, scuttled
over the stinking veined
back. The hand would twist
to shake them loose, thrash
against boat ramp’s raked
cement like a pale maimed
fish, caught and beheaded
but somehow still breathing.
The hand does not recall
how it became the hand.
Shrimp boat or sawmill,
construction or highway,
some hard laborer’s luck,
no matter now, whatever
dark accident dismembered
it left it to steal away
unnoticed, the rot soon
hiding whichever poverty
it crawled from, black
or white skinned no more,
rough knuckled in this life
and the last. Now the hand
knows only how sawgrass
cuts sting, how to hide days
under the dock, how to drag
itself up the stairs night
after night searching out
tender meat, how hunger
survives even death.