Callista Buchen

The Embroiderer


For now, she can hold anything together
with the right thread. She mends holes,
stitches emptiness with color, covers
pillowcases in meadows, dishtowels
in bluebells. The needle makes it hers.
She can fix anything, even her reckless
dreams, the angry children, the husband
with too many hands. She doesn’t know yet
she’ll be tethered to oxygen or about
the motorcycle accident that will take her
son. No, for now, the hoop in her left hand
is a portal. Her right hand, piercing down,
is god. She’ll never learn to cook. She’ll try
to paint. Every plant will hang in macrame.
In fifty years, everything will have yellowed:
landscapes of daises, a parade of elephants,
aphorisms surrounded by French knots.
A water-stained toaster cozy sprawling
with vines. They’ll ask, who made this?
Someone will try to remember. Her
stitches, these moments of claiming,
like flags: I was here, thread says, tongue-
slicked cotton flat against linen, a record
of a particular desiring hand, tied off
and trimmed, knot sharp with want.

Ruin


​I’m researching the best way to preserve
fabrics, investigating acid-free tissue paper
and archival boxes. The women in my family

have always been making something. No one
taught us what is worth saving or how to care
for what you create: resources are too much.

This quilt, white with blue flowers, like dinner
plates, is disintegrating. The thread seems
to dissolve. It is expensive to decide either way.

The quilt is evaporating in my hands. Someone
pulled the needle through. Someone tied the knot.
Someone sat in a hard chair at night and choose

this blue, that shape. There is a cost. No one
wants to live forever. But these women. I trace
the stitches like handholds, like warning signs.

All I know is this time, someone kept the quilt.
We don’t save, but we long for. We hold on.

--
Callista Buchen is the author of the full-length collection Look Look Look (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Double-Mouthed (dancing girl press, 2016). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals. She is the winner of the DIAGRAM’s essay contest and the C.D Wright conference’s Emerging Writer award.