Rejected Embroidery Projects
by Triny Finlay
published in The/tEmz/Review, Issue 22
I stitch whimsy-careful scenes
for people who don’t love me back:
MSN logo, bi flag, Tetris blocks
for the 90s kid who left
on a work trip that winter
and chose not to return;
sun, moon, and rising
signs for the zodiac=led
trauma specialist who preferred
her subtle cats. Understood.
Whose hands will pick those finished
hoops from the nearby dumpster?
It’s all going to light up eventually.
Whose lungs will cave because of the fire?
Oh, Aida cloth,
stretched
and clamped
and stabbed:
I didn’t mean to hurt you, to re-birth you
as something harsher than yourself.
We all know the needle pushes away the pain.
