Mason City Ladies’ Sewing Circle
Fiddle fern hangs near corner porch column, scent
of Honeysuckle suspends in air, swing sways
at porch end, lemonade pitcher, glasses,
sliced lemons, plated ice-box cookies set on
wicker serving table, calico cat naps
on railing crook, rainbow glints off cut glass framed
in Grandmother Susan's mahogany front door,
baskets of mending sit near rattan rockers,
flashing in and out of fabric, needles spark
like the bullfighter's sword, the Spanish dancer's
stiletto heels. The sewing club murmurs,
Ronnie's croup, Ellie's scars from pox, how
their garden grows, soon pokeberry jelly time.
Some quiet complaint how husbands work at
not working, and they sew. Heels and toes of
socks woven in and out, knees of jeans, blue
chambray elbows, christening gown buttons, fine
stitches on collars of Sunday church-going dresses,
the flour sacks are last,
pick up the sacks and sew hoods. The hoods fathers,
husbands, and sons wear when they pound flaming
crosses in yards at night. They sew hoods for sowers
of corn fields in Iowa. With stopped up throats
they sew hoods, murmur about the boys strung up
in the willow, country road outside Mason City.
For Don who sweeps the grocery store after school each
day, Susan sews a hood. The grocer laughs with men
who sit near the pot bellied stove, cold in May,
laughs as they brag about a night they dragged that nigger
roped behind their truck, left him by the river,
served him right, opens the cash box, hands the boy
a dime. Grandmother Susan, father used
her name with a god-like reverence, he'd look at me
and say no one could match my mother, she was
a saint. Grandmother Susan saved her flour sacks,
sewed my father's hood, placed on his head, carefully
felt with fingers, so as not to hurt her first
born’s eyes, marked with pins where to cut the sockets,
sewed the hood. Whose car did he ride in; who could
possibly catch him? His father, country sheriff
and game warden, threw his rifle along side length
of rope, fishing gear, and the hoods in the trunk. Late
summer nights, too hot to sleep, Grandmother
Susan sits with her daughters on the porch swing,
they count fireflies, admire her moon flowers.
A familiar car drives by, filled with men and boys
wearing hoods, what's that caught in her throat as she
turns her child's head, Look the moon is full tonight.
