Stitches in Time

During World War II my father worked 
as a welder in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. 
Beneath the joints in the conning tower 
he had stitched for the Missouri, Japan 
surrendered to MacArthur. At peace 
with a family, he did long-haul trucking, 
potatoes mostly, across the continent 
before working in this factory and that. 
On Sundays he fished or hunted, leaving 
my mother to take my brother and me  
to grandma’s for the day. He was the Man, 
and so when grandma died, we laughed 
to hear my father say he wanted her Singer 
sewing machine. Retired then, too breathless 
from the asbestos welded into his body 
to hunt or fish, he set an oxygen concentrator 
next to the Singer and taught himself to sew. 
He started with repairs to socks and jeans, 
graduated to handkerchiefs and tablecloths 
from scratch, shirts from patterns. And after 
I came out as gay, he—this Man—surprised 
me and my boyfriend with a rainbow flag. 

JAMES PENHA

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. His work is widely published in journals and anthologies and he has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry. His newest chapbook, American Daguerreotypes: Ekphrastic Poems, responds to early photographs of American literary figures. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry.