What Rough Beast | Poem for May 25, 2019

Elizabeth Hoyle
Things we can’t clean

The sanitizer stings
in the dry-made cracks
across my knuckles.
I lather it in anyway,
hoping the clean will
seep into my skin.
It doesn’t.
I pump some more, hiss
as it slices through me
yet again.
Any of his germs
are surely gone
yet I can’t
stop.
He’d only touched
my hand, after all.
I’d asked him
not to.
I’ll need to get a new bottle
tomorrow.

Poems and stories by Elizabeth Hoyle have appeared in Oddball Magazine, Peacock Journal, The Wayfarer, DoveTales, and Boned.  She lives in Beckley, West Virginia, where she works as a reference assistant at her local library. She blogs at Entwined in Pages.

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