My Mother
Pieced Quilts
-Teresa Paloma Acosta
2 in winters
3 as weapons
4 against pounding january winds
5 but it was just that every morning I awoke to these
6 october ripened canvases
7 passed my hand across their cloth faces
8 and began to wonder how you pieced
9 all these together
10 these strips of gentle communion cotton and flannel nightgowns
11 wedding organdies
12 dime store velvets
13 how you shaped patterns square and oblong and round
14 positioned
15 balanced
16 then cemented them
17 with your thread
18 a steel needle
19 a thimble
20 how the thread darted in and out
21 galloping along the frayed edges, tucking
them in
22 as you did us at night
23 oh how you stretched and turned and
re-arranged
24 your michigan spring faded curtain pieces
25 my father’s santa fe work shirt
26 the summer denims, the tweeds of fall
27 in the evening you sat at your canvas
28 - our cracked linoleum floor the drawing
board
29 me lounging on your arm
30 and you staking out the plan:
31 whether to put the lilac purple of easter
against the red plaid
32 of winter-going-
33 into-spring
34 whether to mix a yellow with blue and white
and paint the
35 corpus Christi noon when my father held
your hand
36 whether to shape a five-point star from the
37 somber black silk you wore to grandmother’s
funeral
38 you were the river current
39 carrying the roaring notes
40 forming them into pictures of a little boy
reclining
41 a swallow flying
42 you were the caravan master at the reins
43 driving your threaded needle artillery
across the mosaic
44 cloth bridges
45 delivering yourself in separate
testimonies.46 oh mother you plunged me sobbing and laughing
47 into our past
48 into the river crossing at five
49 into the spinach fields
50 into the plainview cotton rows
51 into tuberculosis wards
52 into brains and muslin dresses
53 sewn hard and taut to withstand the thrashings of 25 years
54 stretched out they lay
55 armed/ready/shouting/celebrating
56 knotted with love
57 the quilts sing on
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