When my grandmother learned
I was sewing for a living,
she took down a suitcase
from the garage rafters and
make me poke my fingers
into its crowded corners
to feel the still-fine stitching.
Her father, she said, sewed linings for luggage
until the dust of a thousand snipped
threads settled in his lungs
and choked him out of the shop.
He gave each child a suitcase and packed
them off to a stranger’s farm
as though sewing was tuberculosis
in the tenement air: catching.
I looked up the company that killed him.
Turns out they did the fabric
linings for caskets, too.
Now, in my dark studio, breathing in lint
as feather-fine as all the Polish words
my grandmother forgot, I see
him weigh his last paycheck’s dollars
and debate: a coffin
just long enough to lie down in
or six small suitcases?
The first a kind of luggage
for the children to bury grief in,
the second, luggage to carry
old grief into new houses.