You’ll never see my hands naked.
My fingers will always be dressed in polish:
beige, magenta, lavender, black
The skin around my nails always torn like sleeves
from a t-shirt on a 95 degree summer day.
People say the eyes are the window to the soul
but they seem boarded up, closed, with the
sign “evicted” tacked onto the chipped wood.
Hands can’t hide behind boarded windows;
that’s why our souls live in our hands, for
they are the instruments that lead a
pen across a paper with the words of our
poetry, the bouquet of bones that stroke
a lover’s cheek, and the feathers that
tickle a piano’s keys.
If fingers are blades of grass, my mouth
is a lawnmower. My soul is tearing apart
its home, leaving skin peeled off and
hanging like loose shingles and blood
dripping from a broken gutter.
I find myself noticing other people’s
hands, watching for callouses, teared skin,
bruised knuckles, and moist palms because I’ve
always tucked my hands underneath my
thighs in order to hide my beaten up fingers
which reveal the medieval battle going
on in my head.
Eyes are empty rooms where our souls
once lived. They live in the shelter of
our hands, a little too bare for those
who care to look.
Julia Dobel is a sixteen-year-old from New Jersey who’s been writing poetry for the past three years. Other than writing, she can be found obsessing over Grey’s Anatomy and Parks and Rec or listening to Demi Lovato and One Direction. Most days, she’s on Tumblr as well. Follow her at juliaconstellations.tumblr.com.