A quilt is an attempt to make something whole.
Turn saved scraps into a woman’s story.
Are these patterns a woman’s story:
Barn Raising, Log Cabin, Wagon Wheel?
Barns, cabins, wagons make beautiful lies
but truth hides in the piecing and stitching.
She hides inside the piecing and stitching
working her secrets into the seam ditches.
Blood work in the ditches, the needle’s bite.
Jagged Edge, Rocky Patch, Broken Dishes.
Read between the lines: jagged, rocky, broken.
In every quilt there’s a secret story.
Every woman has a story she can’t tell.
A quilt is her attempt to make something whole.
–
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press), an Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist, and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist and Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read.’ Recipient of the Philip Booth Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.