Wedding Quilt

It is challenging to work on the quilt. I put on pearl after pearl on the squishy, velvet blanket. Each one built around a piece of how the community perpetuates trauma: blaming, silencing, looking the other way, dissociating, thinking it is okay, saying so.

The little pearls ask, can you cuddle under the a drape of violence? Can you hold the moon? Can you rebuild with us? Will you say “I do” to comforting the comforter? Will you say, “I will”? I will (3) turn pain into pearls. I will chin up, keep my grit to show the trusseau. The whites I bring, blackened with gun threats, rape, and gaslighting.

Will you honor the labor it took to turn a brutal landscape into a warm drape for sleeping? Moon lit night. Are you a revolutionary, do you see with your heart? Are you willing to treat a woman with grace and gratitude in a world that would rather blame victims than push to remove power from abusers? If you are, have you been hurt too?

Let’s spoon under the moon. Let’s make love in the shadow, forgetting all but our new mysterical, nurturing tangle. I will braid your hair with mine, weave my legs into yours. In the night, in the night.