The Thread

My daughter wants in on the pussyhat. She watches as my fingers dip like pigeons, each bamboo stick striking a hole. Push / thrust / invert / then / again.

Her little body thrills at the color pink. She will tell it to anyone: My favorite color is pink and purple. She pronounces them separately, but in her mind, the colors helix.

I am knitting a hat from a loose pattern. I am sitting in a rocking chair in my classroom, where I’m listening to children read The Butter Battle Book. Some of my children ask me to knit them a hat too.

Some of them ask me to teach them to knit. I roll balls during their outdoor time, the parabola of yarn swung round my neck, catching the bark of oak. I start the first rows of skinny scarves and realize: one must have two things to learn to knit. Patience and dexterity. Each student has one or the other; none have both. I put the sticks and balls in a basket and slide it onto a shelf.

I am knitting my way into oblivion. People have compared processing the election to stages of grief: I am fist-over-eyes, fingers-in-the-sockets-of-my-ears, I am humming it away. I cannot hear you.

In the sudden winter melt, I watch strings of preschool students hold a rope, get tugged down the sidewalk. This is how they catch the dawdlers: by pressing them into neat rows. They dip and bow, splash in the puddled snow. They’ve waited for so long.

My daughter asks from the backseat, Have I heard his voice? She asks me, Can you make sure I never hear it, never hear his voice? I turn the knob of the radio low: la la la, we can’t hear you.

We’ve moved into a new house, have a commute now from home-in-the-woods to school-in-the-field. We count wild turkeys on the way in; deer in the nubbly corn fields on the way back. Nearly always, a bald eagle.

My daughter is known to hide behind doors to avoid having her hair brushed. Her skin tingles with sensitivity. When she is three, she picks her lips. When she is four, she picks her nails. Her skin scabs. I take her outside to the slush of our spring-warming deck and show her how her great-grandmother would release all the tufts of hair from the brush into the wind with hopes birds would make do for nesting.

Folded over, seamed, and snipped, my Pussy Hat would make a fine specimen, but as it is, I could wedge my whole family into the canoe of a cap. I gather my children and we tuck the sides around all of our ears. My little boy, the smallest of us all, wraps himself in it like a cocoon. My daughter uses it as a basket for her little figures: in goes the hawk, the clutch of chicken eggs, the lamb. It’s like a clown car, only the little painted faces are tipping inwards, not out.

Each day, the news has some other flash of oddity: there’s the orange smear again, tittering like a weasel. He’s leaving his crumbs on the podium; he’s forgetting the question. His arms bob from all those wasted strings.

________

Molly Sutton Kiefer is the author of the lyric essay Nestuary (Ricochet Editions) as well as three poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Orion, The Journal, The Rumpus, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and the minnesota review, among others. She runs Tinderbox Editions and is founding editor of Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She teaches in Minnesota, where she lives with her family.