2001 winner

my dressmaking aunt

had two shop dummies freda and lou with expandable hips adjustable waists and skin the

colour of musk sticks in the cave of her dressmaking room afternoon light syruped through

dusty windows I imagined I was in a harem smelt dates heard yawning camel wail played

finger puppets with her thimbles of many colours my aunt pinned and snipped  a parade of

beige or blue serge matrons all of whom were dropped off in a taxi in front of her high hilled

house carrying with them the miasma of lily of the valley they brought their own material my

aunt listened to confessions on bended knees offered advice never once looked up their skirts

(what flesh the corset holds the mind should never conjure) afternoons stretched to tea time

the long beak of her scissors bit round the circumference of other womens' lives weddings

christenings all saints days pinned and measured chattered consulted over the excess falling

in tattered strips which waste not want not she gathered up later to make do dads

handkerchiefs and sensible bloomers for herself or if it was eel soft silk or sticky taffeta

clothes for kewpie dolls the Presbyterian relief fund stuck on sticks for crippled children in

far away countries my aunt's womb prolapsed three times in as many years and had to be

stitched back in place by a surgeon who said it was unusual for a spinster who'd never had

a man digging round down there or babies pushing out to need such a procedure she just lost

her elastic bit by bit blamed it on the epsom salts she took daily as a purge for the bowels

not all those seamstress years the gravity of choices never made bearing down or what fell

to the floor day after day the scraps she made a life of when all the matrons had gone home.

by Judy Johnson