"the seamstress"

"the seamstress"
written to a tune of remembering by jake kilroy.

she was a beautiful seamstress of nostalgia,
patch-working daydreams and memories,
cursed to remember her sticky popsicle youth
as children slowly running through a forest creek
with sparklers in hand and a sunset against the hills,
but these were commercials that graffitied her summer,
selling her jeans, selling her love, selling her her own country.

then years after she breathed every color of new york
as a college student set on having her eyes exposed,
she found herself adjusting a potpourri centerpiece
wearing her heart on a sleeveless cocktail dress,
until she saw the moon coming in the bay window.

she remembered the night swims with her girlfriends at the cabin.
she remembered all the poems one lover wrote about her throat.
she remembered the tea lights. she remembered the waltzes.
she remembered what the moon above paris tasted like
when she drank enough absinthe to think she swallowed it.

and there she was, in a southern california mansion,
with a lawyer on the left and a doctor on the right,
described in the ad as art deco by a real estate agent
who had never left the country or been in a museum.

her toes curled against spanish tile instead of spanish sand.
her knuckles cracked like the poet she loved until it fell apart.
her breaths came as slow as the future was supposed to.
jesus, when was the last time she even smelled charcoal?

she wondered,
and then she untied her apron and her lips,
ready to never let go of the moon again.