Lizzy Burnam 🐞

My first “I love you” was a text message, thumbs
the conduit from my heart to his, thrumming 
somewhere across town. In that way, 
thumbing gets you places: through letters, 
through hitch-hiked rides back east, back home.
In college, an Italian roommate taught me 
how to make focaccia, pockmarking dough 
with our thumbs, our thumbs speaking 
a language only understood through body, 
through belly and blood. To accept, we say
thumbs up. To reject, we say thumbs down. 
We fight with thumbs, declaring thumb wars 
in the way only a child can make-believe play 
out of violence. Patience, too, is a thumb’s 
domain: twiddling in waiting rooms, as if 
tick-marking the long seconds with each rotation. 
We hold hands, hammers, and guns with thumbs. 
Our thumbs are musical; they snap in time 
to the beat, draw entire songs out of guitar strums. 
When my nerves get the best of me, I become 
all thumbs: a bumbling bag of disjointed digits, 
a walking tremor with useless hands—yet 
somehow, I still manage to coordinate fingers 
and thumbs enough to unbutton my lover’s clothes. 
I’ve thumbed my nose at the costume jewelry 
my grandma tried to give me; strangers 
have thumbed their noses at me, an alien blemish 
on their social landscape. In spun-out autumn days, 
I thumb through old diaries in search of a sunlit 
memory. Opposable (adj.): capable of being 
withstood. Recently, my thumbs started to ache, 
an inherited pain from dad’s arthritic hands 
and momma’s carpal tunnel. I rub them, 
rest them, and warm them with woolen gloves.
I pinch myself, in awe of the act of bringing 
forefinger against thumb. No wonder the thumb 
has a pulse of its own—so candid is its voice. 
So much can be said with a single outstretched thumb: 
Look up, it’s good, I’m okay, fuck you, number one.