Dakota Reed

The Shapes a Hand Can Take

They chopped down the orange tree on my street
and now the sidewalk is a collage of peel and petals
of pulp. The church bells were rung: not for the tree
itself, but the way in which it swayed. Not for the fruit
it held, but the palms from which they extended.
How my neighbor’s sister loves oranges, so at seventy-one
he is thrusting a stick into a cluster of branches,
hopeful that fruit will fall. How one bleak October,
the library custodian shared his candy-corn with me
in the elevator: tiny kernels of color tucked in a crumpled,
restroom paper towel. How, in such moments, we find
that we can all split a slice of the sun.

I want to learn to love with an open hand,
to not squish the body of the bird
when it grows new feathers. I want the fingertip
of the psychic reading my palm to linger off
into the air, my heart line extending invisibly beyond
my hand. For water to always be cupped in the curve
of it. To be palm-down in the ground, doubled over
in thanks, a pair made for prayer, for professing of what is
good. They chopped down the orange tree on my street
and now all my neighbors are painting their homes
the color of a clementine’s ripeness to remember
how we learned to flatten our flexed fists, to extend, to hold.

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Dakota Reed is a copyeditor for Atmosphere Press. She received her MFA in poetry from the College of Charleston, where she was a Woodfin Fellow and senior editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. Her work is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, has been published in Blood Orange Review and has been awarded the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Nancy Walton Pringle Memorial Prize, College of Charleston’s MFA Creative Writing Prize and honorable mention in AWP’s Intro Journals Project.