Ollie Schminkey – A Hand Becomes [Video]

By Button Poetry

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Ollie Schminkey, performing at the Button studio.

Transcript provided by YouTube:

0:02
– A hand becomes a thing only to unwrap from another hand.
0:07
A peel to throw away, a rake to sift through the ashes.
0:12
The internet tells me my period blood is good for magic.
0:15
I don’t know much about magic,
0:16
but I do know a lot about blood.
0:19
I fill a small jar with blood.
0:21
I fill a small jar with my father’s ashes.
0:23
I wear them around my neck and feel immortal.
0:26
The glass bottles click against each other while I walk,
0:29
and it sounds like the same click
0:31
my father’s tongue made on his last few breaths.
0:34
His tongue fat, and then still
0:36
like the frogs we dissected in the seventh grade.
0:39
I hold his hand until it is time
0:41
to unwrap the life from his body,
0:44
to unwrap my father from a corpse.
0:48
Some people say their dead looked so peaceful
0:50
they could swear they were sleeping.
0:52
For me, it was the other way around.
0:55
For months, every time my father slept,
0:58
I could swear he was already dead.
1:01
I actually started taking pictures
1:02
of him while he was sleeping.
1:04
Maybe half a dozen or so in the month before he died.
1:07
I just needed to show someone.
1:10
When I told my sister, she screamed
1:11
and told me she had also begun taking pictures
1:13
of him passed out on the couch.
1:15
We don’t know why.
1:17
Two siblings wrapping our fingers around our phones
1:20
while the light shrunk itself around his face.
1:22
I wonder if there is a word for that.
1:25
The urge to document the dying.
1:28
I didn’t know my last picture of him
1:30
was going to be my last picture of him.
1:32
If I had, I would have made it something less creepy.
1:36
Maybe one where he was conscious.
1:39
Before they slid him in the furnace,
1:41
did they bother to unwrap his bandages?
1:45
I watched my dad die.
1:48
I watched a man die.
1:51
I held the hand of a dead body.
1:53
I was alive next to a corpse.
1:57
My dad doesn’t have a grave except the one inside my lungs.
2:00
I visit the cemetery anyway.
2:02
I sit next to the oldest gravestone,
2:04
open up a book to read, I say out loud, “Hello?”
2:09
And I’m always surprised when no one answers.

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This post was previously published on YouTube.

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Photo credit: iStock