Who even does this anymore?
Fits the handworn wooden form into the sock,
whispering over, under, over, under,
finger memory needling fine threads
into a net to troll for what I thought
would always be at hand.
Who singes pin feathers over a gas flame,
their acrid gasp of surrender like a sigh
from the closet of ancestors? Or colors
pale mounds of false butter? Her earthenware
bowl is still in my cupboard, the bowl
she cradled between her knees as she squeezed
gold coloring from a tiny packet to flow down
the white mounds like a dream of wealth.
She stirred and beat until it was the yellow
of our hillsides in March, a lap full of sunshine.
We wore gloves to church, and hats: her favorites
were a fuchsia pillbox secretly wanting to be
a French beret; and a cornucopia of red felt
coiling up from her veiled brow, poised
to pour out all she never had the chance to tell.
I buy chicken cut up and clean, golden butter
in tubs labeled with a happy cow eating organic grass.
Socks are packaged in sixes and I wear Levis to church,
but there is heart memory in the smooth wooden form,
in the rhythm of under, over, under, over, the way
I pull threads to finish a pattern, to align the ragged edges
of a hole too familiar now to be mended.
Charity Everitt is retired following a career in technical writing and engineering software design and development. She finds the linguistic precision required in her technical career to be eminently applicable to poetry, making tangible the process of dissolving boundaries between the actual and the sparks of the mysterious. Her poems have appeared in Lyrical Iowa, Comstock Review, Concho River Review, Her Words/Black Mountain Press, and River Heron Review among others.