FINGERS AND TOES

July 20-August 10, 2025
Filipinotown, Los Angeles

Consider what can be learned from extremities,
the tips of us:

pointed acrylics
stacked gold rings
faded heart tattoo
fungus like a rippled lake
bleeding cuticles
cracked knuckles
whorled pads

The phrase had a banal origin.
We were lying on the floral carpet of a midcentury hotel, scrolling through a stranger’s Hinge profile. I said, “It’s like looking at someone’s fingers and toes and trying to see the whole person.”

A private expression in a group chat lexicon, metonymic: “Ok but fingers and toes??”
Meaning: From the information available, what’s your impression?

An impression delays certainty.
It does not resolve. It is soft.
An impression is not yet a thought,
but more and less
before it—

afterglow of sun against closed eyelids, molten silver poured into a mold, shades of charcoal rubbed against paper…

The sense-impression becomes an image, the image becomes “what draws affect into form,”¹
not just impression of but impression on,
which is world-making.

We are, it bears repeating, surrounded by information. As massive data centers drain the planet’s water, we hold inconceivable amounts of knowledge in our palms. It’s making us bored and boring.

Thesis: impressions must be protected.
The callous left by a pen gripped too tight; the light indent where a ring used to be.
Thesis: Fingers and toes is always right.

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¹Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds 

—Erin Marie Lynch