This selection, chosen by Managing Editor Krista Cox, is from Almonds are Members of the Peach Family by Stephanie Sauer, released by Noemi Press in 2019.
[August 2013, Rio de Janiero]
Stitching on the machine opens memory: sewing my own clothes after my mother packed up my belongings without notice and left them and me to save her marriage. Halter tops, altered jeans, satch- els. The Offspring playing. I pieced together fabrics then as a way to comfort myself, to call back into my body the moments I loved most with her: making things. Those hours of focus that opened out the universe in unspeakable ways. The wonder of holding up a finished piece, evidence of that other world. It was not just the awe of being able to make anything on our own, but the envelopment in a world that felt more real, more alive than this one. I came back to this world with magic in my palms.
She attempted sutures: gifts stitched by hand, I love yous. I stopped trusting the words by the time I turned fourteen.
Now sewing brings the pain back, eases it. It reveals holes in my own loving. I held tight to a divine plan narrative to survive that raw pain, told myself it was an experience I needed, one that pushed me to leave the hills. And while today I doubt this story, I can’t help but think I might have been onto something. I loved that rural life. I loved that quiet making, even the practicality of it. I may well have settled early, too, into a life that wasn’t quite mine. Maybe the leaving was necessary. But living has a way of bending you until you doubt every rigid narrative you’ve ever held about yourself. So maybe the story I crafted was true. But maybe, too, I have just done the best I could do and this body that stitches shows its pain too plainly.
