Hand Jive

I was reading Topographic Shifts, one of the many poems in Samiya Bashir’s Gospel, and a flash of memory hit me when I got to these lines:

she must be
they said
corrected

When I was little, my grandmother noticed that I was using my left hand a lot. This disturbed her and became something that needed to be fixed.

So, whenever she saw me using my left hand for anything, she would hit it. By the time I was in kindergarten, it was the prized right hand that I was learning to write with.

She won that battle, but I’m more or less ambidextrous now.  Though, when I write with my left hand it looks like a deranged ransom note. I kinda like that. 🙂