paper • 67 pages • 14.95
ISBN-10: 1-884800-51-3

The Cure

Sarah Gorham

CUPPED HANDS

Whether left palm over right as in TM
or curved side by side—
human hands are full of leaks. Still,

if we press the fingers close,
by sheer will sealing flesh to flesh,
they will hold something.

—An early disappointment:
a hundred foil-wrapped eggs
in pastel colors. For the taking,

I thought, and began to pluck
from window sills, copper pots,
the dark toes of daddy’s socks.

Then the grown-up lesson,
the more I took
the more the eggs resisted

nesting, and capsized, wobbled
away. I ate one tiny handful.
Whether spice drops or wafers

or water carried quickly
over land, we let things slip.
Our hands cupped together

exactly heart-sized;
one hand
alone won’t do.

"Few poets have understood so fully that the heart is flesh. Sarah Gorham is deeply mindful of the world's graces even as she realizes that we are food for the stars. Empathetic yet tough-minded, resilient yet tender, her poems envision healing without denying the difficulties of containment and abandonment." —Alice Fulton
"We all know what's wrong around, and with us, but arriving at a cure is sometimes all but impossible. Then, occasionally, there's a severe, bracing voice, a touch, a retelling of what we have always heard, that makes every difference in how the world, even in the smallest oscillations, appears to us. That's poetry's revivifying gift. It's Sarah Gorham's abundance in The Cure." —Dave Smith