Rachel Loden

What a giant I must seem to them, an exhausted giant who dozes above her sewing. Asleep in mid-stitch, sorting the day’s haul of cinders, rubies, griefs— They were laughing and carrying on, their tiny silver needles flying in and out, tiny silver thimbles on their fingers. It’s no use of course, keeping secrets from them, when chattering is almost their religion. Some held corners of the flag like an enormous quilt, and some danced on little shelves above the workshop. They were so merrie that I fell asleep again. In the morning my beautiful flag was finished, every stitch in place and every seam. So now I raise it—slowly, underneath a secret sky. Near the door to the half-daft and the cradle of kleptocracy. Where it rips and shivers, rips and shivers once more And makes me furiously glad, and fills me up with serious pleasure.

After the offending bit is popped out these tiny stitches on your neck are exquisite. Lips of the slit don’t speak the way you think they should, break into stupid song, blow kisses at the doctor. Some piece that kept insisting on itself will spend a few weeks in a jar on holiday with strangers, stained and diced and separated neatly from its secrets. You can only wait, reading your book about the sex lives of the saints, the lance that pierced and then pulled slowly out of Saint Teresa’s heart. A slice is venerated in Milan, they say, an arm in Lisbon, a single breast in Rome; but her heart’s enthroned behind the convent walls at Avila. Pink under glass, it wears a tiny crown.

Whose bread, buttered on the side of the angels, falls from a great height? So you wait to take the temperature of your enslavement: is it slow-growing, like a virus, or magnanimous and complete? Your interlocutors are generous, the little stretching rack is cute, and all grown over, like an English cottage, with tiny, exhibitionistic roses. Will they open wide enough for you? This is a song about paralysis, despite your sweet mouth running all that rivulet of chatter, despite the fan dance with the missing lampshade bobbing on your head, the children and their panic-stricken laughter.