Amelia

Amelia doesn’t write her words down but there are still stories at her fingertips. The words that emerge from between her lips are bland.  Stale Saltine crackers.  Plain cottage cheese.  If you close your eyes it’s just another teenager babbling.

But there is poetry in her gestures.  Poetry in the way she unthinkingly, unsubconsciously pulls at skin on either side of her neck just because “it feels good”. She’s sitting down but when you watch her you already know she’s a dancer.  Her fingers making eloquent pirouettes by the rosy apples of her cheeks rolling out all the metaphors she doesn’t quite know how to phrase. 

Each finger’s perfect articulations inscribing sensory imagery straight into the air.  Amelia doesn’t need words the same way if you speak 3 languages you don’t pass through the second to arrive at the third.  Each slight tremble of her hands as she giggles imparts delicate scent directly into the real world.  

Her hands don’t dance on a typewriter. The world is her keyboard and her perfectly arched hands waltz over it all laughing at our preconceptions of limitations playing Beethoven as they scramble across a laptop’s keys writing out yesterday’s biology homework.  Finding ancient worn words that Microsoft would scoff at on the rusty “vintage” keys on her necklace she fingers haphazardly as she speaks.

They have such grace that they dance in spite of her.

You feel her story floating toward you when you watch them fox trotting with a damp kleenex mopping up behind her tears when she pulls the covers all the way up to her chin and doesn’t feel like talking.

They fill in the umms in her oral presentation swirling explaining calmly on her behalf that something’s are to big to capture in a single word while her mouth still stumbles, glancing at her notes before giving up and moving on.

  Mostly she’s unaware of them.  She’s busy.  And she’s tired.  A lot. When she slouches in her old beat up pajamas with no makeup on she doesn’t feel pretty.  But take one look at those hands one tensed around a steaming mug of jasmine tea the other combing her cascading hair back off her face and you feel it.  Take one glance at those twirling fingers and you know she’s a dancer.  Take one glance at those amazing fingers and even though she’s unaware, you know:  She’s beautiful.    

Author's Note

more a passage than a poem