Sewing in Kampot

A sewing woman returned to her Kampot guesthouse. She splashed water on her face, changed clothes and spit into red roses. She kick started her cycle and rode to the local market inside a dirt labyrinth.

At her corner stall she keyed multiple locks. She stacked numbered wooden shutters. She dragged out her Butterfly sewing machine, ironing board and manikins.

Dummies wore exquisite yellow, purple, blue, white shimmering silks decorated with sparkling silver stars, moons and small reflecting balls. Her skill designed fabrics for women needing elaborate sartorial refinement attiring engagements, weddings and cremations.

She stayed busy with serious fittings and adjustments. Her universal process was selecting fabric; measurement, ironing backing, a ruler, white chalk to mark pleats, cutting, pushing her machine treadle, pins, threads, trimming edges, hand sewing clasps, shiny connections and ironing.

Threads inside a slow prism flashed light and shadow as needles danced through cloth in endless conversations.

Needles talked about traditional conservative behaviors, attitudes and opportunity-value cost.

Thread followed their conversations. Together they measured precise calculations establishing a stop-loss number.

All explanations have to end somewhere.

Sky darkened

Ceremonial tribal drum thunder sang

Vocal intensity

Lonely lost suffering

Foreign faces

In Cambodia

Shuddered with fear

What if I die here?

How will my family and friends realize my intention to witness 1200 years of dancing Angkor laterite stoned history in gnarling jungles revealed by natural strobes? 

Lightning flashed skies

Giant flashbulbs

Illuminated petrified children

Buried inside cement caverns

Floating bamboo homes

Eyes

Eating cartoon images

On plasma screams

Skies opened

Rain lashed human crops

Rice blossomed green

Cloud tears cleaned earth

Sweet dreams baby

Rita, Ice Girl in Banlung smashing blocks of ice inside a blue plastic bag with a blunt instrument created a symphony outside unspoken words as a homeless man with a pair of brown pants thrown over a thin shoulder sat down to rest.

Shy women waiting for Freedom averted black eyes.

Aggressive market women manipulated stacks of government issued denominations trusting an implied value in exchange for meat, fruit, vegetables, gold, cotton and silk.

Counting and arranging denominations inside broken beams above fractured cement and mislaid wooden planks covering sewage channels with debris, feathers, jungles and jangled light particles, financial dealers surveyed commercial landscapes with dispatched dialects near rivers revealing stories with fine stitched embroidery.  

Lucky and Zeynep played a musical interlude in Bursa, Turkey.

“I know the music but forgot the words,” said an adult swallowing Xanax.

“Music is the fuel,” said Zeynep spinning her Sufi dervish trance dance.

An Anatolian mother intent on cleaning disorder - afraid of losing control of chaos because nature loves a beautiful mess - on her apartment balcony after shaking out wet underwear, dish towels and frayed family threads, hung them in shameful angry regret and slammed her door on dervish music, It's the devil's music. She loved sitting in dark rapacious self-pity waiting for a jingle jangle phony tone.

“Are you alive?” she said to her cellular daughter.

“I survived,” said a disembodied voice.

“Where are you? When are you coming home?”

“I’m with a tribe of women. We’re breaking down and breaking through old conservative values. They are so narrow we’ll need a crowbar or acetylene torch or C-4. We’re developing personal empowerment and dignity. I’ll be home someday mother. I’m doing my healing work.”

Her voice died. Swallowing ignorance mother lapsed into healthy doubt’s quicksand.

At sunset an imam’s recorded voice twittered from a mosque near Achebadem, “Allah is great and merciful. Buy a ticket.”

Push Play.