El tobogán de manos

We are sitting under the slide,
the firelight flickering across the walls
in streams of stolen sunlight against the
dark draped ochre where
we lay our hands,
rich with wet earth,
handprints steady on the
blue plastic bleached by
Phoenix light.

It is the first thing we remember,
the imprint of our fingers in paint, saying:
“This is me, I am here,
the world is beautiful, and
I am a part of it.”
We persist,
like the paint made from
dirt and water
hoarded from the playground water fountain,
leaving brown moons under
unclipped fingernails.

We bloomed each recess,
our mural growing with the shapes
of birds and snakes,
dogs and cats - the strays
on the hot walk home -
telling the story of our evolution,
marking the shape of the potters
bent over the raw clay we
clawed up around the eucalyptus
and baked in the afternoon sun
to give us the best of things:

bowls and plates and cups,
the tools to make our craft easier and to
play pretend dinners and
tea time, while the swift-footed and strong
hunted pigeons with nets
of dead grass and stick spears before
coming home where
we circled under the smaller slide to
share stories and mark them on the
neon yellow, until sunset
when the man with the hose would hesitate
in front of our pictures, smiling at the
tiny fingers of our overlapping hands and the
long line of clumsy clay on the curb.

In thirty minutes, every day,
we remade history,
our hands knowing the
ground and the river,
though warped by
stainless steel and concrete;
we remembered.

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Aurora Gabow is an aspiring poet based out of Phoenix, Arizona. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona.