Leslie Lindsay
She used to sew.
Stitches. Thread.
Needles.
Spooling around me,
Like a vice.
A tapestry of desire.
She couldn’t have what she thought
She deserved,
So she created.
Press. Wrinkle. Hem. Cuff.
Button.
Over and over again.
So the material
Mattered.
Her evil traveled in straight lines,
Stitch by stitch.
Spool by spool.
Winding around the cloth.
Drapes and pillows.
Pleats and folds.
Until her hands bled,
Until her mind became gnarled,
The syllables so ancient, they become familiar.
***
Leslie Lindsay is a mother, wife, and writer living in Chicagoland. Leslie is the award-winning author of Speaking of Apraxia (Woodbine House, 2012). Her work has been published in The Awakenings Review, Pithead Chapel, Common Ground Review, the Ruminate blog, Cleaver Magazine (both craft and CNF), The Nervous Breakdown, Manifest-Station, The Mighty, and forthcoming in Brave Voices Literary Magazine. Leslie is at work on a memoir about her mentally ill interior decorator mother and eventual suicide. She reviews books widely and interviews authors weekly, www.leslielindsay.com. Leslie is a former child/adolescent psychiatric R.N. at the Mayo Clinic.