manos

last night I went to the closing of an exhibition that was called, I think, manos. it consisted of boards which were mounted with old, old, old rocks (yes, rocks) that had been used once as tools for grinding and perhaps other things but I don't know what things, and then writing instruments (pens of some kind or other) and then poems between them, written with said writing instrument. I can't say much about the poems because honestly most of them were illegible (which honestly, I liked) but I can say that I put my hands up to the old rocks and imagined, for a moment, that the impression of the labor of the women who had been grinding day after day, generation after generation, was sucked up into my hand and travelled up my arm and wanted to get far into my body. like I always do when it seems as though the sad dead want into my body, I say "shhh and go" but this is a hard thing to do in public, so I just said "shhh" and blew softly into my hand as if to let go of all of their hard days for them, as if as if, all of their broken and hard hands whispered away.