Let me tell you about the linen to wrap the dead / see how you can unbind desiccated limbs / pull apart the fibers / soak and flatten / turning cloth of death into a different kind of matter / imagine art from cast off waste / the knowledge we wear opens pages / material that clothed bodies in three dimensions / opens minds in all of them in libraries of patchwork ideas / Penelope unwinding and weaving the story of her endurance / scroll through the book of her life / so many old stories laid threadbare to sewn into new tales / yarns taken from pulling apart the work of generations / distressed thematic oddments / orphaned embellishments / I’m as guilty as any rag picker poking through frayed old works like experiences I outgrew / to reuse them as darts to give shape to personal history on the page / to become cloth to become pulped mush turned to paper processed for ink impressed upon them / decades later I cut them up and create an applique of recombined words / endlessly addressing how fibers became clothes became books became art / object then subject / interchangeably once we read what we wore and clothed ourselves in what we read

BIO: Rebecca Dempsey lives in Melbourne / Naarm, Australia. Her work has featured in The Ekphrastic Review, Mocking Owl Roost and Triggerfish Critical Review. Rebecca can be found at WritingBec.com