mantle ovenbird I want to give you something you can wear that is as complex and beautiful as the heart you carry in its cage of blood and bone. I start with a skein of Bluefaced Leicester, dyed with goldenrod and coreopsis, rich and warm like the dawn that creeps over your eye’s most distant horizon (your iris flecked with amber sugar kelp, your pupil a trench that sinks all_the_way_down to the hadal zone). I knit a vast expanse of fine fabric with edges that undulate and short row shaping which I will fold like a sculpture of paper pulp into a cloak to keep you warm. I turn the pages of a well worn pattern, working through the detailed instructions until I come to a gap in the sequence. Page nineteen is missing. I find page twenty, loose and out of order, tucked behind page thirty-two, but page nineteen is gone. I fear that if I can’t complete this thread borne spell I won’t be able to make my way back to you. I want to stand before you carrying enough hope to drape over your sagging shoulders, enough woven songs to make a dent in fate’s mad symphony of darkness, but I am without the necessary enchiridion, and despair touches my neck with searching fingers, icy and grim. I strive to stitch you a future from the fraying threads of my fragile yearning. There’s no template for what we are, just moth eaten possibility, the daylight making its way through the portholes opened by everything we’ve lost. 251230 what's it to you? who go blather from