Photography © Jaime Diaz Martinez

 

The Lost Art of the Handshake

I’m sitting here trying to recall
the last person whose hand I shook
before the pandemic prohibited it.
All I hear is my father’s voice
resounding across the decades advising
me to always maintain a confident grip.

I nearly broke my wife’s fingers
the day we met. She waited until
we’d been dating all summer before
confessing she had to ice her wrist
for an hour after she got home.

To think that paternal wisdom injured
the woman who nonetheless deigned
to marry me makes me wonder about the poor
wounded soul locked down at home
on the couch cursing me for preventing
his ability to twiddle his thumbs.

I think the time has come to let go.

 

Ted Millar has been a high school English teacher for twenty years. His work has appeared in myriad literary journals. In addition to writing poetry, he is also a political blogger for Liberal America, Liberal Nation Rising, and Medium. He lives in the heart of apple and wine country in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife and two children.

Jaime Diaz Martinez is originally from Los Angeles, California. He has been residing in Paris for over 30 years. AFter many years of seeing so many photo opportunities passing, he decided to pick up his camera from storage some years back and from that day on the camera has been held over his left shoulder ready to come across fleeting or ephemeral street scenes. For Martinez Being able to photograph Paris streets is a unique opportunity, a city with fifty shades of grey or just heaven. His photo pays homage to a picture taken during the Spanish Flu epidemic.