EMILY A. TAYLOR

can I go back to a simpler time

where Aran wool needles cardigans to rows
lead to what Nan calls a slip stitch. Prophecy really
I don’t know how time slips like this.
Wake up and there’s a jumper. Feels like

a long time ago we knit chains to paper,
ripped them to shreds for days apart.
Our youth was a beige and beaten
Oldsmobile—as in car, not your father.

It was us and an egg salad sandwich
with mayonnaise and that gauze of yellow.
Years later, I think our paper chains are
serif fonts crossing the poles of an H. I think if

there was a chasm, we could knit it
to a cardigan your daughter wears
pink like the bow on strappy heels
envy of her school bus, yellow

egg salad sandwiches. Uncrust
a stitch of bread, slip