Karen George

Karen George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), Caught in the Trembling Net (2024), and the collaborative Delight Is a Field (2025). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her award-winning short story collection, How We Fracture, was released by Minerva Rising Press in 2024. Her poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Her website is https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.

Sewing Dreams

Mom taught me to sew at eight. I made my wedding gown of pale-yellow flocked with dots, tiny
white flowers, tender green leaves. I quit at forty, gave my machine and accoutrements to a
coworker who wanted to learn. Now, I only repair clothes by hand—
a seam undone, a detached button, hems needed. But I still dream sewing thirty years later. How
to initiate thread’s path from spool through guide, down, up, urged between discs, through the
take-up lever before threading the needle’s eye. I place fabric beneath the presser foot and feed
dogs (raised metal ridges with pointed edges), which move it along the silver throat plate. As the
needle pierces the fabric, combining upper thread and bobbin thread below to stitch a seam,
attach a zipper, form a buttonhole. The sewing machine’s sound—a rhythmic clicking that varies
with the speed I control via foot pedal, plus the whirr of internal gears—mesmerizes, soothes me.
The clicks, like the ticks of time passing, mark my progress.

I wake, wonder if
I dream of sewing, or if
the sewing dreams me.