A Poem for a Later Super Tuesday

We are close to the midpoint time of the ordering period for my chapbook; you have until April 22 to order during this very important time.  Go here to order your copy.  It will ship in June, and you'll have a lovely summer treat. 

You may ask, why not wait to order until it's ready?  Because the press run is determined by how many books are ordered in this time period.  If the sales reach certain levels, more books are published, and since a second printing is unlikely, it would be great to make it to some of those higher levels.

Here's a poem to whet your appetite; it seems a good choice for this day when many of us head to the polls, an additional Super Tuesday which may determine political fortunes and which may scare/sadden/anger many of us:

Restoring the Seams

She used to count every rib,
a loom around her heart,
like the Appalachian tool
that spools honey into her tea.

But years of good food and wine
now hide her ribcage.
She lets the seams
out of the side of her favorite
dress, a dress bought long ago,
a dress stitched by a distant
woman in Afghanistan in a different decade.

She thinks of that country
come undone, torn and shredded.
She slides the seam ripper
under threads made softer
by the humidity of many Southern summers.

She thinks of distant graveyards,
young men buried in alien
landscapes. She thinks of English ivy,
that invasive immigrant, clinging
to the marble markers,
obscuring the names beneath.

Hours later, half blind from restoring
seams, she walks the woods
of a neighboring monastery.

The monks have reclaimed
an old slave cemetery, but a toppled
angel lies face down in the rich dirt.
She sets the angel upright
and brushes soil off her half-eroded features.

This poem was published in Adanna.  It's a poem that wouldn't exist without a variety of other people's thoughts and pictures on their blogs.  For more on that process, head on over to this post I wrote when I first wrote the poem.

To see how this poem interacts with others, order my forthcoming chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction,  here.