‘Tatters’

Tetiana Yatsechko-Blazhenko is a Ukrainian writer, poet, and visual artist. Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Midway Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Gabby & Min’s Literary Review, Eleventh Hour Literary, Corncrake Magazine, Sheepshead Review, Plants & Poetry Journal, Red Ogre Review, Hearts of Thunder. She has contributed to anthologies such as Tidings, The Haunted Words Press 2025 Anthology, The Echoes We Make, Rituals & Remedies, and In the Language of Flowers. In 2025, she won in the prose category of the Odesa Miniature contest.

Tatters

My grandmother and her sister were tatters.  Using a needle and one thread, double stitches are supported first on the needle, then pulled off over the eye onto the thread. Rings or chains cluster from that repeated single stitch, creating negative space for tiny beauty.

In summer, the sisters sit outside on lawn chairs snapping green beans or shelling peas. But in winter, they sit by the window in the sorrowful light, tatting edges for handkerchiefs, pillow cases, and dresser covers, fingers flying through the familiar looping and knotting.

My grandmother carried hardships in the empty spaces.  She was 75 when I was born, a shadow of her own daughter lost, this single thread of female line. By the time I was old enough to learn to tat, her sister was gone and her own fingers stiff and eyesight dimmed.

And besides, my sight was on the full moon and the spaces between the stars.

Ruth Zwald When an astrologer told her she had no “earth” in her birth sign, Ruth set about finding ways to ground. On her farm in West Michigan, Ruth starts every day with good coffee, tends large gardens, and lives close to the earth through her lifestyle and spiritual practices. Upon retirement, she also started to unearth words. In 2024, Ruth was named winner of the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Contest for her collection entitled, “Bones And Breath.” She has also been published in several periodicals, most recently in Farmer-ish Journal, Poetry For Mental Health, The Guilded Weathervane, The Bluebird Word, and Tangled Locks.