Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry
October Hands
My hand, in the dry October air,
remembers holding yours, so weak and warm
with age; skin paper thin and fine,
delicate with wrinkles, cracked and lined,
as though a record needle there
could play the rich but scratchy notes
of songs gone low and soft with time,
vinyl chords on vital signs,
the lines of your refrain passed down to mine.
In the silence, the stylus of my finger finds,
the heartbeat of your hand and plays
its wrinkled records, yours and mine.
Caleb Hill works in cyber security by day and writes poetry around the clock. He lives in central Pennsylvania, where he sleeps on the floor in an upstairs corner of his parent’s house. He chops vegetables to give his mind a break from writing. When that doesn’t work, he buys fruit. He has been writing poetry since his father taught him the haiku on his eighth birthday. He has featured in one or two of his father’s published poems, but has not yet published one himself. He found out about the Letter Review Prize from a Reddit post about poetry prizes.