She has no hands so she holds her breakfast between her breasts. I want to take whatever is left of her hair and make a large doll with working thumbs and perfectly sculpted knees. One night I hid inside of her closet with an old 8mm camera and filmed her while she slept. Another night I knelt at the end of her bed like a man at prayer and watched her chest heave up and down and I placed my right hand on her comforter and I could feel her warmth and the sticky cotton scent of her sweating body and with my left hand I masturbated.

He says it is amazing that our knuckles keep knuckling even after the organ grinders. Our hands can make music, our hands can break sunglasses in a blind rage, our hands are wrinkled and aging and broken and mechanical. He says his hands are about as good as hot-dogs at making women happy. He says he replaced his pinky finger with a scale-replica of the Millennium Falcon.

Sometimes she sits on her back porch and laughs at android squirrels that I control from a nearby tree. Every time she showers she can smell me inside of her soap but she doesn’t yet know it. She lathers the soap into her forearms before rubbing it down her body. I lather it into my face and my eyes and I leave her messages carved into the bubbles.

He says he wore a plaster casing on his hand for fifteen years and when he removed it his hand glowed like an old light bulb and smelled like cheap cough medicine. He insists hands can replace the heart if they are reinforced with rubber and steel.

I watch her grasp doorhandles with her teeth. Sometimes I follow her for hours through streets that do not require holding things, parks that do not need her to gasp at the air.

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Drew Kalbach lives in Philadelphia. His chapbook The Zen of Chainsaws and Enormous Clippers is available from dogzplot.com’s chapbook series. He blogs at this-blog-is-a-piece-of-art.blogspot.com.