Hands like birds
by
Hannah VanderHart
Hannah VanderHart lives in Durham, NC, under the pines. She has poetry and reviews published and forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Her first full-length book, What Pecan Light, is forthcoming from Bull City Press in Summer 2020, and she is the Reviews Editor at EcoTheo Review. More at: hannahvanderhart.com.
from Hands Like Birds
Hands Like Birds
after Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders (1610)
Her hands like birds in the air,
the elders, fully dressed, press
their bodies against the stone casement.
Six hands crowd the center canvas.
Her feet are pink, her bath was just
beginning—a lesson is that women
seldom get to bathe alone. A linen
cloth folds like a table napkin
under her left hip, over her left thigh;
His fingers grasp close beside her hair.
She is batting away flies with her bird hands.
She is chasing mosquito hawks
from her face. Her fingers are open beaks.
The flies are abundant all year long:
they fill the fields with their dark
clouds, circle the animals’ pink mouths.
She has stood in a field of them. No escaping
their buzz and hum, the sticky feet.
We always want what is not shown:
the vindicating Daniel; the thumb
screws or ropes that held the painter’s
fingers as she testified under torture—
they hold her there. They hold us there.
Her rapist is one of many let go.
