LIFE Poem: LEFT-HAND TRANSLATION, by A.C. Blake

In the beginning,
there were scissors—
awkward, wobbly things
designed for someone else’s dialect.
I turned them upside down,
angled the paper,
translated jagged edges
into an art no one asked for.

Someone always leaned in:
“No, no, you’re doing it wrong.”

But they didn’t speak my language—
the twisting of paper,
the tilt of the wrist,
the underhanded script
of a pen skating uphill.
Ballpoint pens—designed to pull—
balked at my push,
their ink drying mid-sentence,
a conversation cut short.

The nuns hovered—
guardians of a single alphabet,
their hands twitching to edit
what they couldn’t quite name.

“Straighten that paper, child,” they’d say,

but I wouldn’t.
Even as my script flowed neatly,
their eyes narrowed,
searching for a flaw in my adaptation,
suspecting it wasn’t right.

Maps and driving became another kind of grammar.
North, South, East, West—
a right-handed syntax

I rewrote with left-handed verbs.
Every intersection required
a pause, a translation,
the world flipping in my mind
like a mirror reflecting backward roads.
Impatience buzzed around me—
the shorthand of right-handed speakers—

“Just let me do it!” they’d snap,

unable to read my pause,
to grasp its necessity.
But I learned to disarm them with humor,
a quick turn of phrase:

“Funny, you’re fluent in right,
yet here I am still getting us there.”

The bossy ones—
oh, how they love to edit—
their corrections landing
like clumsy subtitles on a foreign film.
Over time, I rewrote their static,
turned their scolding into background noise.
Sometimes, I flipped the script,
pointed out how their grammar was wrong.

Sometimes, I just smiled,
thinking of the lexicon in my mind,
of scissors bending to my syntax,
of words, lines, and images
unfolding to fit the arc of my left hand.

There is power in translation,
in bending a right-handed language
without breaking it,
crafting stories and art
from the spaces they overlook.

And if they notice?
I let them wrestle with their own incomprehension,
while I continue creating—
or maybe,
I was simply writing a language
they never learned to read.