“You still have your sewing machine?”
my mother asked
two weeks before she died

of heart failure. I said yes,
she nodded, satisfied
with all that could be

certain. The array of stars and planets
the day she gave me
birth decreed we’d miss each other

in the mist of all our differences,
unseemly daughter, stylish mother
linked by a slender thread

drawn from the spool, drawn down
around the tension knob, fed
through the obedient needle

piercing the fabric, locking
through loops of thread the wheel
brings up from the bobbin below.

A Featherweight, black base
trimmed with triple lines of gold —
her gift when I graduated high school.

She’d reserved it used, we went
together to the shop. With this tool
for making dresses, curtains

she conferred initiation
into bare uncertainties,
equipping me to be adroit

as her immigrant parents
were in New York, Detroit,
Sam upholstering seats for Ford,

Pauline mending, making
alterations. The feed dog
rolls under the presser foot,

tracks the fabric back and past,
a light touch guides, puts
a sturdy line of stitches in, seams

the cotton, rayon, wool,
catches the piping in between,
inserts a pocket, fastens a placket.

I used the Singer to piece batiks
in greens and blues, made a jacket
for myself last year. Lined in black,

the lining shows the words
twelve friends have given me to map
my presence in their lives.

The jacket wraps around me
like a sigh,
like moonlit clouds masking sea.