Devotion: The Garment District

In bed as the machinery of morning begins, indistinguishable the subterranean turbines of the A train from the jet engine as it gins the clouds, rips and reseams the length of dungaree on its way to Pittsburgh (with the terrible and subtle cargoes, with ashes and a cat under the seat) from the pulleys of the service elevators from the baffled sound across the alley of the hand-iron press and the sewing machine motors whirring bobbins that stitch together the hot properties of Seoul and the suburbs and the idiot village of Chelm, needle the veronica and the Buddha robe and the sateen for spring. I looked over at her. Her skin a warp of Christ and a weft of meat. All night she had hauled me and the boy and the smoky, feckless men I was across the fens and stretches of mesquite through the tunnels and delivered me to my misery and the laborious knots of the sheets I wound myself in. And she was exhausted from Eros and swollen from anger. She could stand to put on a few pounds. I could see it in her ribs. Before I would marry my restlessness to her terror, before the crushes and wages could be made into our equity, before the endlessness would end in spinning jennies and sleaze and the noise of a fleet of vehicles with tinted windows testing the evacuation routes, I would cut, then peel, then dice, then caramelize some onions before she wasted away to nothing.