One Look at My Hands Will Tell You I’m No Kardashian

I know more about Khloe Kardashian than I’d like, and one thing I know is that her hands will never look their age. When she’s eighty-five, her hands will be a cryogenically-frozen version of twenty-five, like ice-packed fish overnighted from Tokyo Bay to a three-star Michelin sushi bar where Khloe might deign to have lunch one day, so long as it’s comped. Among the celebrity trivia shrapnel lodged rent-free in my brain is the fact that Khloe’s mother, Kris, admonished her from girlhood to care for her hands the same way she cared for her face—moisturizer, sunscreen, collagen injections, stem cell infusions, and whatever else these women do to embalm themselves in a permanent state of femme-bot fuckability. Khloe’s in her forties, like me, but her hands would look perfectly at home on the body of a Beverly Hills Vampire minted at age sixteen. Not my hands. My hands are rough, happy tools that would never consent to be groomed and coddled like a pair of Persian cats. My hands are tree-climbing, oil-changing, frog-catching, pot-scrubbing, pavement-scraping, rock-picking, carrot-digging, log-peeling hands. You’ll find them testing razors, raw-dogging bleach wipes, and pinching out candle-flames. They’ve got no interest in dangling like uselessly tiny designer clutch purses from my wrists, or posing as metonymic stand-ins for my genitalia. Someday soon, my hands will look as if they’ve scrabbled for centuries in parched Mojave sands. But believe me when I say that I won’t give a shit, and neither will they. My hands demand to live hungry, unsheltered, unmanicured, touching every staining, scarring, bruising, burning, bloodying inch of this world without gloves. My hands are the fearless, prehensile extensions of my heart.

Francesca Leader is a writer and artist originally from Western Montana. She has poetry published or forthcoming in Hooligan, Broadkill Review, Sho Poetry, Frost Meadow Review, Door is a Jar, Stanchion, Nixe’s Mate, Bullshit Lit, Cutbow Quarterly, Literary Mama, Poetry New Zealand, and elsewhere. Learn more about her at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com.

A Song for Francesca