Growing up I had a gentle cello teacher.
She wore cashmere sweaters and sipped tea,
though I hated every second of our lessons,
grew calluses on my fingertips the size of hurricanes.
As I bowed and plucked each string,
the kickback from the coiled metal ran through me like a chill
and the notes hovered in the air like a swarm of gnats.
At every entangled melody, every stiff-arm staccato,
my cello teacher would stare as if to turn me into stone,
her mouth no wider than a coin slot.
But when she played, there were no entangled melodies,
no stiff-arm staccatos, only song. She skated across the strings
with angelic ease, for she was fluent in octaves and
chords and scales, her first language Vivaldi,
her greatest love the sound
of stick against steel.
Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Maddy Hoffman is an emerging poet based in Virginia. She has a poetry Instagram, @penny.poetry, where she writes poems about the beauty of the mundane.