Written during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hands to Hold is a collaborative visual poem and video by Pamela Sneed and Emilio Rojas, commissioned by the Centre for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College in 2021. Bringing together poetry, performance, photography, drawing, and film, the work emerged in dialogue with two durational performances devised by Rojas.

In Exercises for Becoming (Blood of my Blood), Rojas spent 6.5 hours drinking 1.5 gallons of sap from a 250-year-old sugar maple, the weight of his blood on sap, in New York’s Hudson Valley. In the performance Hands to Hold, he washed his hands for eight hours with a cast of his own hands made from soap—a gesture that transforms the ubiquitous ritual of pandemic handwashing into an intimate meditation on touch, labor, care, contamination, and loss.

Moving between Sneed and Rojas's voices, the poem traces connections between blood and sap, bodies and trees, touch and labor, mourning and survival. It expands outward to consider racialized and often invisible labor, queer histories, ecological interdependence, and the artists and workers whose hands sustained communities through the pandemic. The recurring act of washing becomes at once prayer, purification, protection, and longing for physical contact in a moment defined by distance.