so much to figure out:     
the cracked vessel of my heart,  
the mind’s erasure,  
the cells stitching quiet in the dark,  
a needle whose language finds its tongue.  
I want to hear those stories,  
to witness the wreckage.    

All the women in our family are seamstresses, 
knowing how to stitch a hidden hem.  
We are containers,  
here in the land of remembered things.  
This is our history, where we go, we walk on bones.  

There exists ways of listening.  
Unreel a bit more of yourself each time.  
When the hum arrives, hum back   
like a flower of sound opening, into a trumpet,    
a wishing moon, a slipper of ancient rock, 
a goddess, a wink, a dream of wildness.    

There is a knocking in the blood.  
It hurts to love the world.  
What if we remembered the shy soul in everything  
that joins two selves like a hinge,  
the way we slip stitch and knot this love.
For the moment we’re mirrors,  
but there’s this stitch and the next  
coming together into a circle.    

I know something of the pull,  
to be swallowed by  
that brief kinship, of hold and hand.  
I’m trying to soften  
the raw places  
to find a way to  
set things in motion,  
planting my secret seeds,  
honeyed and slow   
abundance.   

~ A cento, using lines/phrases from the following books: All the Fierce Tethers, essays by Lia Purpura Blade by Blade, poetry collection by Danusha Laméris Entwined, Three Lyric Sequences, poetry by Carol Frost Hereafter, fiction by Sarah Freligh The Hurting Kind, poetry collection by Ada Limón Telling the Bees, a poetry collection by Cathryn Essinger Maps of Injury, poetry collection by Chera Hammons Everything Gets Old, poetry collection by Grace Curtis