Quilt Superstitions
By Cindy Veach
At twenty-one he gets a Freedom Quilt. She gets to make thirteen quilts for her dowry but will never marry if she sews hearts on a quilt. A dowry is no guarantee. If she takes the last stitch or sews hearts on a quilt or doesn’t finish a quilt or puts in the last stitch or breaks a needle on her wedding quilt or doesn’t finish a quilt or quilts the thirteenth quilt or breaks a needle on her wedding quilt or quilts the top before she’s engaged or quilts the thirteenth quilt or breaks a thread or quilts the top before she’s engaged or gives him a Wandering Foot quilt or breaks a thread or breaks a vined border he’ll never settle down and she’ll be an old maid a broken border of vines and misfortune. She'll be an old maid, never to marry. He'll have the fortune to have a Freedom Quilt. The poem was inspired by a lecture by Lisa Erlandson as reported in The Gainesville Daily Register by Heather Pilkington, February 29, 2012. https://www.gainesvilleregister.com/community/quilting-myths-busted/article_0193c469-705b-53e1-a99c-4e94ef4ddedd.html
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press), a 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal finalist, and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book Must Read. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and Samuel Allen Washington Prize, she is poetry co-editor of MER.
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