Issue Thirty-Three - Winter 2019

Ambidextrous

By Kristin LaFollette

but not really.
When you have no choice,
you can make your body do
almost anything.

With my right hand shoved
into a ball glove, I can
barely feel the leather
against my skin. Instead,

I admire the stitching,
think about how it
resembles my own
reassembled hand,

the one that can no longer
hold a ball—When I hold
my arm above my heart,
I can feel living blood

drain to my chest. What
does it mean that there is
skin on bone, bone on bone,
where a whole part of myself

used to be? Someone once said,
Use your left hand, most
artists are left-handed anyway.
What I think but don’t say:

Between the two of them, it’s
still the right one that I love

the most.

Copyright LaFollette 2019

Kristin LaFollette is a PhD candidate at Bowling Green State University in Rhetoric and Writing and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems have been featured in RED INK, Common Ground Review, Bridge Eight, West Trade Review, and Poetry Quarterly, among others. Her work was featured in the 2017 anthology Ohio’s Best Emerging Poets, and Kristin's manuscript Body Parts won the grand prize in the 2017 GFT Press Chapbook Contest and was published in March 2018. She currently lives in northwest Ohio. You can visit her at kristinlafollette.com.

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