Breadcrumb #575

AREN LANDAU

It starts with a snag
A dropped stitch when I wasn’t paying attention
When I was
Too distraught to be careful and I didn’t care
If the tapestry was perfect
You were there, and you held me
Through whiskey breath and tears
Mourning the mess we made of excess yarn, lurid pink and strewn about the kitchen
In coagulated snarls 

But you prod the bruises before they even 
Have a chance to settle,
To congeal into a putrid yellow that belies where broken capillaries
Knit back together
A pattern I could follow with my eyes closed even though
The rows are always crooked
The warp of curves, the weft of womb, and the blood that rises to the surface 
To greet a pair of bone-white needles

You never saw him
Teeth bared in my face, eyes hungry
The shard of ceramic on my floor the sharpest
Thing in my room besides
The gasp I take
When I finally pry his hands off of me
You heard the bed shake through the floorboards but couldn’t hear my heart
Tremble in its cradle
Once you would have rocked me until
Each sob was just a hiccup, a memory my lungs recall 
When they can no longer grasp onto my sorrow

You say you’re sorry but all I hear is
How can you be so clumsy still?
And it’s true-- my stitches are never straight
The skeins of me always unravel
I fall down the stairs, twisted and tangled
And you are tired of tugging the thread
Trying to pull my wounds closed when I am far too fond of frayed edges
You say you’re sorry but all I can think is
It’s my fault
For never healing in the arms of someone gentle
For fumbling against cold porcelain
And wishing too hard for soft fingers

How easily I forget 
That those who touched my heart before were never tender
Knitting needles catching, snaring, careless in their mending
How easy it was to forgive the nails
That cut me into crescents
The seam ripper clutched in her fist, glinting in the moonlight
Like a textile weaver’s smile
But I never forgave myself for coming home in tatters
And when I look at you my heart still aches with the memory
Of sympathetic vibrations, of a summer when
I still trusted a seamstress 
To know exactly where to hem, exactly when to purl
With steady hands to darn the loose ends closed

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