Nervous Hands

By Ugochukwu Damian Okpara

here are my hands, lonely as they can be.
i once asked a man to hold them & confess
his love for me. the man shy as my father
held them & didn’t know what else to do.
i could mistake him for my father standing
face-to-face with me, not smiling. once,
he called to me in the middle of the night
to understand what plagues his soul,
the darkness being a perfect cover
for a crying father & maybe a son
reaching with hands outstretched & failing.

BIO:
Ugochukwu Damian Okpara is a Nigerian writer and poet. He is the author of the poetry collection, In Gorgeous Display (Fordham University Press, Sept 2023). A 2023 Lambda Literary fellow, he is currently an MFA poetry candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi.