Slow Hand {a gothic romance}
by dawn lonsinger
There’s a hand inside your pants and it’s a slow hand. It’s not your hand, but a separate hand. A hand with a history, a hand that has vampiric tendencies. A hard-on hand. It’s a hand without a brain, a clumsy hand. It’s knocking on your skin, trying to get in. It’s a hand overwhelmed with responsibility, gothic in its quest for atmosphere. There’s a hand inside your pants, an unsure hand, a double-take of a hand. Hand chased by a terrible thing. A hand that can’t get away from itself. It is a dark and stormy night in your pants. And there is a phantom-hand on the prowl. It is trying so hard, in your pants, to undo itself from flesh via flesh, hovers like a vandal, sweats. Borrowed hand, tying a knot in your pants. Editorial hand. Bland hand. Hand pickled in its own handiness. Locomotive hand. It has something to say but no voice. For example, with this hand in your pants you are hapless. A where’s-my-worth hand, a cold hand, a beer can of a hand. Meaty hand that wants always to be other than a hand, to traverse being with touch, to feel something . . . anything alive, and in that feeling become more alive, pirate warmth. Feverish ruins. Flu-hand. Panic-hand. Salmon-hand. There’s an ad hoc hand in your pants, and it moves like a cave lizard reading Braille with its translucent body. Cosmically slow hand—in your pants—blindly gazing at you, as others before you. Story-board hand. A hand with a plan. Scavenger hand. Opera hand. It’s a tan hand, a normal hand, a community hand. A hand without accomplices. It’s a hand pleading the fifth. Slowly, slowly it bobs like an astronaut who’s dangling in space but tethered to matter. The birds all flock away. It’s a dark and terrifying resurrection. Well-timed hand. A drowned clown hand. Vacation hand. A clammy hand, a starfish, a vamp. There’s a hand in the forbidding mansion of your pants amid an index of nerve endings . . . but this hand has no nerve for ending, is addicted to fumbling. It’s a hand in touch with its inner ruse. It’s a moving fossil, rubbing residue on you. You are caught between yourself and this hand. Between pants and no pants, dignity and bribery, jinx and ennui. Between the past and a replica of the past, between futility and death. Don’t turn on the lights. Only after a convincing disaster will you squirm, sense there’s no man behind the hand. It’s a straw man hand, and it’s in your pants. There’s no denying it; there’s a slow hand in your pants. And it might just settle in there if you don’t scream.
dawn lonsinger is pursuing a doctorate at the University of Utah, and is the author of two chapbooks, the linoleum crop (Jeanne Duval Editions) and The Nested Object (Dancing Girl Press). Her poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, New Orleans Review, Sycamore Review, Subtropics and Best New Poets 2010. She, like most living organisms, has a thing for light.