If only I could slip myself through the eye of a needle,
and stitch my life into a straight line: a needle 

pointing north. When I stumbled off the edge, 
my grandmother pulled from an empty cookie box a needle

to stitch ugly scars onto my nylon tights. I fell 
into a forest of pine trees, lush with needles, 

hushed with the sound of learning to live 
alone again: the scratch of a needle

against a Simon and Garfunkel record, my father’s fingers flipping 
through the vinyls he left behind and received years later after needling 

my mother’s guilt. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
Together, we weave elbows under shoulders, threading the needle 

through the keyhole of a small charm. If only I could string up whole cities 
and wear them around my neck: Seattle, the Space Needle, 

the bodega beneath the four story walkup with a wild cat 
whose claws sink in skin like needles, 

the window through which one could see my mother and I at the yard-sale
table, she forked fear into my hair, and in my hair: needles.

Each night last summer the magnolias unfurled their angel wings, 
she let them wither in glasses filled with water, leaves fell like needles 

littered in dark passages and bare mattresses. Here,
I am lost. I touch my loss and it sounds like needles 

lost in a haystack, can you ever find one? Even now 
my mother knows where my loss lives, she needles

it out of me. Petals scatter like snow on the ground, and out 
through melting frost poke the first tendrils of spring: needles.