YARD ART

Previously published in Drunk Monkeys literary magazine.

I accidently knocked over

the Singer sewing machine,

an old black metal one I found

in a junk store.

It sits on my front stoop,

yard art, I call it.

All the neighbors stare walking by,

and only one has asked,

why do you have a sewing machine

on your steps?

Or the neighbor who uses it

in her directions, as in,

go 2 houses past the sewing machine.

But today that 40 lb machine

fell on its side,

and I thought of you,

and what you might be thinking

in these dark days of our republic.

You, who raised me with all your

fiery rhetoric about democracy,

who used a Singer sewing machine

to put food on our table,

and kept sewing even when your

finger got pulled under the needle

and you slowly turned the wheel

and until it came out,

wrapped it with a white cotton strip

the red so bright

as you kept sewing.