Karyn Lie-Nielsen
HANDBUZZ
It is 1956.
The deaf are partying.
I'm the only one
here who hears
whose ears
aren't stuck or broken.
I'm small and odd, ignored,
but not bored.
I'm learning to read speech unspoken,
the fanning and shaping of hands,
the squiggles on pages of faces and fingers
and hands.
The handbuzz is whirring,
propellers hurrying
oil-slick, urgent for language
that moves quick
and greedy, needy for talk.
It is for eyes to hear
the click, the hum and the lightest flick
of motion.
I watch Mother and Father,
red-tipped Kools glued
in waving ravenous fingers,
smooth magic of practiced hands.
Thrilled with language seen
I dare the handbuzz myself,
waving a thousand flies clear
I'm in the air
with wild, careening, made-up motions,
signs blind to meaning.
That's when their handbuzz veers,
their listening eyes converge
like spotlights merged
to sudden moves. My mother
pops my hands a sharp rebuke.
You jeer and mock us. You ridicule.
I should know my place
which is sidelined, floored,
red in the face
and burning inside my terrible hands.
The blades of the buzzing mother tongue
start turning again, like augers
rusting inside my chest
chanting the awareness
in a dialect piercing and strong:
You're out of hand.
You don't belong.
* * *
HANK WILLIAMS AND MY FATHER
When haints swarmed the scrub in the barefoot hills of the Ozarks
one blew its swamp breath directly into my father's fevered childhood sleep
and within days he became a deaf boy
barely recalling croaks and groans
from the pin oaks around the edges of that tar paper farm.
So I want to thank Hank Williams even this late in the season
for returning rhythm and sound to my father.
Because when Hank sauntered into that old kitchen
with his guitar and Stetson hat
within days the stuffing fell from my father's ears.
Then like the armature touching the record on the player,
Hank and my father, shoulder to shoulder, troubadoured away
their songs as clear as the center of Hank's guitar.
Hank Williams and my father
both with slicked back shiny black hair
grinned wide enough to touch the four corners
of even the most soundless hearts.
To those lonely haints that smudged the maps of their souls
Hank and my father winked and teased Good by Joe!
Me gotta go, me-oh-my-oh! and within days
little black notations on sheet music appeared
in the racks at the dime store.
The broken drums in my father's head became
jewels in his eyes and I want to thank Hank Williams for that.
And for giving my father back the keck and holler
of crazy hearts, the voice of howl at the moon,
the mish and mash, squib and squeal, the warble whack and wheeze
from the radio in the hall
the sonorous timbre of a wife and two children,
the resonant way he had of walking
just a step above the earth
in that pocket of air,
that magic space hovering just above adversity,
the witch grass whining through cracks of cement.
Karyn Lie-Nielsen lives in mid-coast Maine where she writes poetry, short stories, and personal essays.
Her work has appeared both online and in printed journals, including Wordgathering, Poetry East,
Maine Magazine, and The Comstock Review. Her first book,
Handbuzz and Other Voices , is the 2015 winner of the Damfino Press Afternoonified Chapbook
Contest. Raised by Deaf parents, she has taught American Sign Language, worked as an interpreter for the
Deaf, and performed with the National Theater of the Deaf. She holds an MFA from the University of Maine's
Stonecoast Writing Program. Visit karynlie-nielsen.com to see some of her ASL translations of poetry.
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