A Stitch in Time by Ronald J. Pelias

In the emptiness of her house, she
sits at her kitchen table, crocheting
round pot holders, her sight gone
with her husband of sixty-eight years.

Each stitch marks time until,
as she says, she can join him.
Each stitch pulls together
another memory into the circle.

“Nobody wants these things.
I can feel all the mistakes.
They pass the time though.
That’s all I got—a little time.”



Ronald J. Pelias’ work has appeared in a number of journals, including Small Pond, Midwest Poetry Review, Margie, and Whetstone. His most recent books, Leaning: A Poetics of Personal Relations (Left Coast Press), Performance: An Alphabet of Performative Writing (Left Coast Press), and If the Truth Be Told: Accounts in Literary Forms (Sense Publishers), call upon the poetic as a research strategy.