Celisa Steele

Contest - 1st Place

Celisa Steele’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Cave Wall, Poetry South, San Pedro River Review, Raleigh Review, Comstock Review, The South Carolina Review, Broad River Review, and others. Her first poetry chapbook, How Language Is Lost, was published in 2011 by Emrys. She lives in Carrboro, NC, where she served as the town’s poet laureate from 2013 to 2016.

The Buttonhole Stitching Around the Heart Can’t Stop the Unraveling

You can see the seam if you look closely, look at the wrong side, pull two pieces of fabric at the right spot, at the armseye or along the godets of a six-gore skirt: the running stitch skipping the length, hidden and not usually thought of except by the maker, the tailor—or the mistress of the tailor, who has learned he loves her best not undressed but basted in muslin like the mannequin in the haberdashery, everything pinned, neat as his trimmed beard and immaculate fingernails.

“ This poem originated from a prompt Traci Brimhall gave in a workshop that encouraged us to delve deep into the terminology particular to a profession or hobby. My poem wound up being a single sentence—not a constraint that was part of the original prompt but one in keeping, I think, with the illusion of seamlessness a master tailor might wish to create. ”

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