You know what yarn feels like?
Of course
You know what yarn feels like. It’s
Soft and maybe itchy
Like tennis balls,
And
Sort of dense? When you squeeze it
Between your index and thumb,
And it comes together, hardens
Like
oobleck
.
Can you feel it?
During the last hour before I left home,
I saw this
Yarn painting
of a mouse
in the back of my attic.
The yarn lies in strings and strokes,
Long, uninterrupted threads that stretch the whole canvas on top,
And spiral inwards to fill the ears and the cheeks,
And zig-zag to texture the whiskers.
It’s all brown to me, with pinches of white and black.
I feel, in 2027, when they put me in the psych ward
They’ll make me make something like this.
It has psych ward texture, gentle, simple, designed
For tying up the frayed.
I bet, though, that my dad made it
for fun. Yes, he made it, that’s why I —
He was ADD too, or had it, like you have a cold,
A mold cold, a black mold cough cold, the one that goes away
When you die. Sorry, loose end —
Most of him went away when he died.
I’m left, then, with
Yarn Mouse.
Yarn Mouse is
Teaching me how to love. I’ve never been in love,
But I can try it. I can love like Yarn Mouse
Like careful, simple, soft and itchy and kinda dense
Like beige that makes me warm
And brown that burns
Like Auntie’s huggy eyes
Like soup
Like the word ‘homemade’
‘Homebody’
‘Home free’
Loose end. I mean to say
There’s this Canadian that I live with, Madeleine
Who doesn’t believe she deserves what she has,
And deserves so much more. I’ve never told her that. But it’s true. Madeleine looks like Yarn Mouse.
She smells like him too, and sounds like him, and tastes like him, and feels.
She feels:
Warm. Brown, and beige too.
There’s this soft spot on top of her head, next to the thread of white yarns. When she comes to me, and I
put my cheek there and huff dopamine like dessert —
When she texts me in class and I laugh/cry until I have to step out —
When she pancakes on the floor like hot roadkill —
When she listens.
In Yarn Mouse, my dad either twirled the yarn round and round, like spaghetti on a fork. Or he just
snipped off the end.
You know what yarn feels like?
When you press your cheek up to it,
Inhaling what’s there,
And it’s itchy and soft and you love, love, love.
You know.
