How to Sew

Step one: gather your materials

Enter an unfamiliar space containing yards of possibilities

wrapped around individual, indecipherable descriptions.

Become overwhelmed,

drowning in the folds of everything you do not know.

Yearn for a simpler time,

before you decided to forge this new frontier,

craving the comfortable mundanity

of a memoir, remembered –

a passage about a girl from a little house somewhere,

shopping for calico with her sister

who, blinded by smallpox,

counted their pennies.

But change never really was your thing.

Step two: cut your pattern pieces

Vacuum your floor before and after this endeavour.

The uncooperative emerald velvet you found

in a dimly-lit corner, where your inexperience was partially obscured,

is about to be draped over every hill and valley of your apartment.

Real velvet, once, was made of silk.

But now it’s generally as synthetic

as your confidence, as you snip shapes out from its surface

and hope later you’ll know which way is up.

Attach them precariously to one another.

Right sides together. Wrong as it may seem.

Endure every pinprick: sharp reminders

that you are prone to making miscalculations.

Lifelong struggles with spatial awareness coming back to bite you

in this inherently geometric undertaking

requiring specific understandings of shapes, distance,

the three-dimensional nature of our universe, etc.

Try not to bleed on the velvet.

By the way, is this machine-washable?

Step three: sew

Perhaps we should have started here:

how comfortable are you operating heavy machinery?

To sew, it turns out, is not a matter of fabric and thread.

They are your materials: your canvas, your paint.

Your brush, however: no tangible object,

sliding seamlessly into your hand,

soft side gliding across its designated surface.

Instead, this is a brush as invented by the industrial revolution.

Mechanisms destined to forge ever forward.

Their conspiratorial machinations testing

the leadness of your foot.

The deftness of your fingertips.

The weave of your patience.

A piston engine atop the kitchen table,

pounding down from above, pulling up from below,

on the plush, green lawn

of what was to be a party dress.

Nothing to cry over, when, time after time,

straight seams meander into dense, twisted vines.

Green grappling green.

So you hack, machete-style,

at your dreams of becoming

a self-sufficient homesteader

in the territory of the perfectly tailored.

Accepting adoration for your industrious creations –

would that they could ever make it out into the world

hanging like this broken thread

from your pincushion limbs.