America has to duck to get her crown through the door.
One point of the crown catches the little bell,
which keeps announcing her
long after she wishes she had slipped in unnoticed.

She lets the heavy wool drop from her shoulders onto the counter.
The seamstress sets down her mug, chilled at the rim.

“It doesn’t fit,” she says, her fingers digging into the dark weave.
“Show me where,” the seamstress says.

America opens her mouth and 250 years try to answer at once.

The oldest parts demand the cut they remember.
The youngest parts keep showing her where the lining’s worn through.
Neither of them is lying.
Red hands haul the left sleeve;
blue hands wrench the right.
A seam pops,
and each side swears the other pulled first.

America tries to stand up straight, but she only makes it worse.

The seamstress settles the tape measure around her neck like a stole,
and turns the coat toward the light.

“Before I touch it,” she says, “empty your pockets.”

Out spills the sediment of a week:

an auction slip from a farm they paved and named The Meadows,
which is how the meadow found out what it was worth,
a bartender’s tips, sharp with the tang of squeezed lime,
a wooden rosary worn smooth as river rock,
a transfer for the 6:10 bus to Des Moines gone soft in the rain,
a widow’s key to the house she had to sell,
an immigrant’s photograph, folded between the faces,
a tribal enrollment card from a nation older than the coat,
and a sonogram two women have already shown everyone,
pointing to the small gray weather in which, they’ve been told,
there is a hand.

“Is that everything?”

America digs her hands deeper, past the reddish grief,
and drags out a lunch-debt notice:
$14.60 from a 3rd grader’s take-home folder,
a silver chip from a church basement where 10 people
help one another get all the way to another morning,
and a note that begins "If anything happens."

The seamstress sweeps the table clear.

“I wanted it beautiful,” America whispers.
“They always do.”
“Everybody’s got an opinion on the hem.”
“They generally do.”

“Half of them want the original horn buttons back,” America says. “The other half say those buttons are why the chest won't close over our lungs. Some want to burn the whole fit and start over from the sheep. Some hear that word ‘BURN’ and pull the lapels shut tight enough to choke.”

The seamstress taps the flat of her shears against her palm.

“Can you make it right?” America asks.
“Right for who?”

America stares at the silver and paper spread across the wood,
as the seamstress takes off her glasses
and pinches the two dents they’ve worn into her nose.

“Tell me,” the seamstress says,
turning down the radio in the middle of somebody being right,
“where does the wind get in?”

America looks down and says:

“Everywhere.

At the bus stop where the glass was kicked out last Friday.
Under a trailer door in Brainerd,
where a father kneels with a towel and a butter knife,
trying to tuck February back outside.

Through the phone when the doctor stops saying ‘treatment’
and starts saying ‘comfort.’

Through the hold music,
while a daughter gives her father’s birthday
to a 5th stranger in the hope of getting him another one.

At the kitchen table, where a boy slides his spelling test over the shutoff notice, leaving the gold star showing.

In the bathroom, where a girl who pulls the knit down over her wrists so nobody asks about the red tracks.

In the laundromat, where a grandmother spends her last quarters warming a blanket that is already dry."

The seamstress reaches out, takes the heavy dark wool,
and pulls it to her chest like a child she’s trying to soothe.

“Here, then.”

She wets the thread between her lips.
The steel eye misses once.
She trims the fray with her front teeth, squints, and drives the line through.

“My mother loved this coat,” America says.
“She wore it to bury my father. My daughter puts it on though and says she can’t breathe.
How do you mend a thing that keeps tearing itself apart?”

The seamstress doesn't look up.

“I would ask them to try it with their arms around somebody.”

"The Coat We Wear”
24×24 Oil and Acrylic on Canvas