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January 24, 2021

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en temps de peste

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Massage Therapist’s Lament

  • March 23, 2020
  • 7:10 pm
  • New Orleans
This is an easy time to wish you did not work/ with your hands.
BHousten

Betsy Housten

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This is an easy time to wish you did not work

with your hands. When every person 

 

on Earth is told to stay six feet from everyone 

else’s messy, lurking petri dish of a body, 

 

it is understandable that you might momentarily

curse your choices, collapse onto the couch 

 

in the back room of the best job you’ve ever had 

and cry like there is no tomorrow. Because 

 

there isn’t. When mere proximity’s a death knell

the world over, your days of coaxing release 

 

from the soft tissues of your fellow humans 

are numbered. How many hundreds of muscles 

 

put up their grim dukes, at first; how many 

thousands of others felt your fingers’ insistence 

 

and let go their oldest story – telltale red 

of blood vessels dilating under skin, your work 

 

working. How many have cried on your table.

How often you wiped your own tears on a sleeve 

 

while gliding down an upper trapezius, stretching 

a piriformis, cradling suboccipitals until both 

 

of you breathed deeper. When this is all over, 

there may be no normal to which to return 

 

but you will still have your hands; you will still

know the answer to the question of why a body, 

 

how change that seems so sudden it knocks 

the wind out has been building this whole time.

 


 

Betsy Housten
Betsy Housten is a queer writer and massage therapist who earned her MFA at the University of New Orleans and makes her home in Brooklyn. Her writing appears in Autostraddle, Sundog Lit, Rogue Agent, Lunch Review, Little Red Tarot and elsewhere. You can find her at betsyhoustenwrites.com.   

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