Wheelchair Handles
1.
I walk beside you.
Untouched handles.
They aren’t your hands.
I’m not your nurse.
2.
When they’re with us
our daughter grabs the handles.
Behind you two
her boyfriend walks with me.
3.
The straps of my shopping bag
stretch across the handles
its gaping mouth, ready for more.
Your face settles into
that expression of resignation.
4.
The fifth-century Chinese
trundled the disabled in wheelbarrows.
You let other people take the handles.
Push you without asking you first.
“I’m basically lazy,” you say.
5.
You roll to the car
to drive me to the ER.
My sprained ankle throbbing
I cling to the handles.
6.
When our daughter is three
she pulls your arm to get you off the couch.
“Come on, Daddy, let me show you.”
“Daddy can’t get up, baby.”
The wheelchair trundles toward you
her little body hidden by the back.
7.
Designed by a German paraplegic in 1655
the first wheelchair was self-propelling.
In 1783, the handled wheelchair
was built by a walking Englishman
the common model ever since:
simple instead of independent.
8.
The only times
you touch the handle
is to fold the wheelchair
behind the driver’s seat.
9.
When she starts pre-K, you tell her
put one hand on your armrest
so you can roll but still keep her near.
As she grows taller
she puts her hand on one handle.
10.
Hard plastic, ridged and slippery
warm only in summer
I’d rather hold your hand
or nothing.
• • •
A 2021 Pushcart nominee, Ujjvala Bagal Rahn was a finalist for the 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, and her second poetry collection Memories Lounge was a finalist for the 2021 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. Her work has appeared or will appear in journals such as The Threepenny Review, The Tipton Poetry Journal, I-70 Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, and the anthology Fantastic Imaginary Creatures (Madville Publishing). She is the owner of Red Silk Press, a micropress of science fiction, science, poetry, and memoir. Red Silk Sari (Red Silk Press, 2013) is her first collection of poems. She lives in Savannah, Georgia.