She has visions by Carla Sarett

I don't sew, but I have visions, the woman said, 

on her way to a sewing circle, in her small town. 

I saw quilts with roses and stars and daughters' names, 

women sipping mint tea before it cools, 

talking of rose gardens and roast lamb and

lace tablecloths, stained with red wine.  

All this, before a rare silence holds them.

And I saw my friend's visions, 

buttons planted in gardens, strewn across lawns,

along the highway to San Francisco, 

silver threads lining streets, under my footsteps, 

under bodies of half-dead men who wake

bound by silver threads.

A rag doll, discarded on an elevator floor, 

black buttons for eyes, arms torn at the seams, insides exposed.

A girl knows its buttons from her mother's garden, 

the garden once grew roses, now only buttons,

her mother's face once had smiles, now blank as the moon. 

She will stitch the arms with silver threads, 

and bury the doll in her mother's garden.

These are not my friend's visions.

She sees a quilt sewn with words from a dead tongue. 

Its message is for her alone, and she will never know it. 

Carla Sarett's recent work appears or is forthcoming in Third Wednesday, Prole, Hobart, Across the Margins, Boston Literary Magazine, and The Virgina Normal; and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2018) and Best American Essay. A Closet Feminist, her debut novel, is forthcoming in 2022. She lives in San Francisco.