What happens in airports

Philadelphia 

She saw me at a table tapping at my laptop. 
I looked up and saw an airport ID on her large bosom.

She said you look like a writer. 

Can you help me write a letter for my church? 

She wears shiny gold dresses on Sunday she says.

She gives roses to pregnant girls on marble stoops.

She says to them, join me in the house of the Lord,

She wants to help her church people fly.

The Feeling of Scissors Cutting Away

There was never a scream when you died,
only the sound of inhalation and exhalation.

Scissors can make an itty bitty cry
at the axis of of two blades.

Long cuts are slow and steady.
Little snips are quick breath around curves.

What has been cut away is considered negative,
disqualified and discarded.

Intentionally, remaining cloth can be
draped and darted into something new.

A beating presser foot
pumps matching thread into matched seams.

Let no one split apart what God has
joined together.

It seems I have lost the ability to believe this,
Because my careful wedding dress is gone.


( My mother sewed my wedding dress and my sister's wedding dress. A few years ago, I took the wedding dress out of the plastic and a pink foam hanger had permanently ruined it. I secretly put it in a dumpster. This poem is the poem of grief).