Through the thin eye, I twine a prick of metallic tap water
along a down-swoop, then up, in silence. What
I am left with is a moment to knot the water around itself,
then to sew. Tap water is the cheapest water to

sew with, as its minerals wriggle together too easily. Nobody
sews with tap water except poor people. I am a poor person.
When the needle presses through the cloth, the problem with 
tap is that it soaks the edges of the cloth harshly.

Filtered water is slower to do so. Wet also, for sure, but 
who can speak against the quality you find in a water threading
as smooth as a river? Your stomach will churn with hunger for it,
as though church service has lasted longer into lunch but

you must be pious, anyway.

Tap water holds its loops nicely -- look at this shirt! --
which is all only what the poor in spirit like me need. 
Which is a shirt. And the way tap smells, it is a Baptism to any 
clothing you mend, including shirts. Expensive water contains less

harshness, but containing less rarely amounts
to shirts. Today I have mended the same shirt I have 
referenced earlier with tap. The holed spots are each
so damp, so cold. And yet there is a bit of home in this now:

silent, poor, cold. Those words, this covering. The place I live,
the shirt I live in. Odd, those essences offering comfort to 
what knows me naked daily, or to what can cleanse. Odd, the eye of a needle
that can sweep up a pious slop like me, held by a loop, and mend.