Emily Dickinson marked her poems with ‘+’ signs near a word to indicate a variant to that word. She did not choose among her variants, leaving them as concurrent alternatives. Variable pulse constellations for her readers to stitch to a sky then attempt to navigate the wild nights and noons of her poems and epistolary impulses.

A variant may appear +
+ above the word + to the side of a line + underneath a word + at right angles to the poem.
Whole poems may be variants of each other.

Stanza 1:
In the closet, the dress lives, a deep white in its vinyl
bag, its crepe ivoried, tartared
like a tooth, feeding on what leaks through
the zipper’s fervent mesh, an unmentionable,
unworn, waiting, immortally in mind.

Goodnight moon

In the town in which I was born there is a collective of women taking apart donated wedding dresses. All across the country there are similar knots of women reversing others’ handiwork, seam ripping and taking off lace, unstringing beads one by one by hand in their spare time. These women are always looking for more women, particularly ones who can’t sew, to help take the garments apart. Recently they were bequeathed a gown with an exceptionally long train. Every inch covered in lace appliqué. They say it takes a very long time for a seamstress to undo a dress, to carefully remove every thread. Time she could have spent sewing other things up.

Clothing is particularly personal as material culture and, through its form, suggests the intimate physicality of a person no longer there.

Rather than the stunning earthly blue of the twin Gemini spacesuits or the aluminized silver of imagined interstellar travel and early flight suit prototypes, the astronauts who planted their feet on the moon were outfitted in crisp, work-shirt white. In part because the heat-safe white nylon was a superior surface. In part because it kept each astronaut safe from, + the risk...of dazzling himself with his clothing while facing the unfiltered sunlight +

...like any couture customer, the astronauts would often change their minds about fit details, sometimes causing their entire suit to be taken down to its components and carefully reassembled

For many years traditional wedding dresses were designed in dark, heavy fabrics—fabrics which could be worn more than once. After all, a worn-once dress is hardly economical. A single lavish 19th-century silk wedding dress shifted tradition from thrift to splendor, from re-wearable colors to what would become the ridiculous western tradition of lacey and virginal white. Though Queen Victoria’s white was practical and patriotic: supporting artisanal over industrial. Her royal 18-foot train and abundant orange-blossom appliques—invitations for future fertility—were said to single-handedly revive Honiton lacemaking. My grandmother on the other hand wore a smart, two-piece gray suiting dress. As a seamstress, a dress she likely sewed herself.

And a lot of times we’re sewing or making things and maybe the girl next to you is doing the same thing but we never see the suit put together.

It can take years to perfect a new magic trick before you can perform it seamlessly. In 1983, in preparation for his plan to vanish the Statue of Liberty in front of a live audience, David Copperfield first practiced with something more readily accessible. He invited famous magicians from all over the world to come to a parking lot in LA and watch him disappear a full moon from the night sky. Afterward he asked everyone to give notes for fine-tuning—you know what they say: if you can fool a knot of magicians you can fool anyone. I have to assume the moon trial was successful because a few months later as helicopters buzzed in the starlessness around her head, Copperfield raised an enormous diaphanous fabric in front of the iconic statue—mesmerizing both a live and home audience into believing the lady would vanish right before their eyes. And she does—the fabric falls, the audience is looking out at nothing.

And then there was Rosa.

Rosa was her name and would she have been Rosa
if her name had not been Rosa. We used to think and
then we used to think again.

Would she have been Rosa if her name had not been
Rosa and would she have been Rosa if she had not been
a twin.

Rosa was her name all the same. +

If one twin was a Rosa the other twin had been not a
Rosa and then we had decided which of the twins had died.

We all had names and her name was Rosa, but would
she have been I used to cry about it would she have been
Rosa if her name had not been Rosa. Would she have been Rosa
if she had not been a twin. Rosa was her name all the same.

Because of the era’s squeamishness about physicality, Dickinson and her contemporaries at times represented the body at one remove from the body: that is, through dress.

When asked to conjure images of the 1960s desire to arrive on the moon, we do not usually pull bras and girdles and sewing machines from our sleeves. But there’s a hidden intimacy in space travel—in spite of NASA’s attempts to find a suitable military engineering solution, astronauts were outfitted by the seamstresses sewing undergarments that famously shaped the female figure of the ‘40s. Borrowed from stitching bras and diaper covers, from latex-dipping girdles at Playtex—to fabricate a suit that allowed a body to endure a lack of breathable air, to be willingly sent off through the atmosphere. These seamstresses learned to enact accuracy befitting otherworldliness without the use of a single straight pin for tacking and exactness. An infinitesimal needle puncture the only difference between— and— .
And no earthly rehearsal before their trick was performed live by astronauts before a national audience. The interior of their spacesuits touching the exterior of the body. The exterior of their spacesuits touching airlessness. A body kept safe in the vastness of space through couture handiwork—a collective of women rendering the moon possible with precision stitching.

Yes it is true there is still one dress meant to be worn just once. Just once, this one, white dress. And yes, how difficult to have that one dress, meant for just one day, be required to be as exquisite as—. Impossible really. A myth. Like the story of the daughter who saves herself by requesting a dress the color of the moon, a dress whose dye contains just enough anger to give her strength to leave. To keep people from being tempted to re-use this one dress we entice a bride-to-be to dazzle herself while facing the unfiltered sunlight, we lure her to wear a color inviting disaster and spills.

When the astronauts came down from the moon they were immediately isolated due to fear of microbes and germs, of a moon plague coming back with the crew to Earth to infect us all. For three weeks upon returning from their journey the astronauts lived in a hepped up silverbullet trailer known as the “the mobile quarantine unit”—first on an aircraft carrier, then at Pearl Harbor, their faces pressed to the rear window for interviews and gimmicky photo-ops with President Nixon. It didn’t seem to matter that NASA scientists knew the intense unlikelihood of lunar life. Or that the rest of us Earthlings would have already been exposed when the astronauts’ capsule was opened to retrieve them—any infectiousness instantly airborne, blown out over the ocean.

In the town in which I was born there are women who deconstruct donated wedding dresses and repattern them—into burial garments and buntings for babies who die in the labor and delivery unit or in the neo-natal ICU. Often there are more dresses than necessary, an abundance-of, and their bestowing has to be stopped. With the exception of dresses coming from mothers who have recently—. For whom the donation may be a way of surviving or beginning to—. There’s no mention of what recently might mean.

A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an undercoat and a sizer a sizer of talks.

A shawl is a wedding +

+
Goodnight light  And the red balloon

In Margaret Wise Brown’s great green room There was a telephone And a red balloon And a picture of—. And all the many named objects—from a mouse to mittens to a bowl full of mush—for which the book will become known. But there is also the window split into three panes and a moon split in two and twin asterisk stars tacked static in the night sky. And there, in that great greyscale sky inside the book, a few small white plus sign stars resembling stitches.

every change to the suit—including both changes in dimension to suit each astronaut, and changes in configuration to enhance individual astronaut’s comfort—called for enormous additional documentation. This was tantamount to arguing that a shirt or pair of trousers became a different object when altered, or even buttoned

Prior to a funeral service mourners are required to rend their garments—exposing their heart by tearing a worn piece of clothing. The rending must take place during the time of most intense grief, not after. The grief must be recent. The tearing must be done at once. The tearing should be done as a collective effort. During the first seven days after a marriage brides and grooms may not take part in the tearing, as this is a time of inviolate joy even in grief. In the absence of this ritual of rending, of ripping the fabric at the heart, of exposing the heart which cannot be torn nor mended. In the absence of a funeral might mothers who have recently— + ask others to do this work for us. The sanctioned destruction of dress meant to offer relief—keriah—the sound of fabric being split somewhere other than a seam, like a cry.

A white wedding dress in my family is considered bad luck + an ill omen. Though good luck if it rains at least a little on the day. Many marriages with a bride wearing white have gravitated toward misfortunes—so the stories go. To wear something in any other color is to refuse to invite the Fates to the forest—in their three white dresses with their glinting silver scissors ready to cut even the shortest thread. Besides, it is hard to put anger into a white dress—where would it hide? In the closet, my mother’s home sewn wedding dress with the red wine stain buried deftly among the multi-colored polyester flowers.

Stanza 4:
how difficult to have only one dress and that one
white. Unlikely really, likely
to be a myth.

After you register your name and the time you head to a containment area where you have to scrub in before you are allowed to enter the sterile area. There are signs everywhere explaining the simple instructions—wash continuously up to your elbows with soap for a full three minutes. You will then walk with your arms raised, bent at the elbows, palms facing your face, through the automatic sliding doors—the way every surgeon in every TV show you have ever seen walks into an operating room. To maintain a quiet environment for healing and growing and to protect privacy, please avoid talking or lingering in the hallways. A clear plastic bag will be provided to you to place your device in.

Well if you make a needle hole...and you don’t admit that well, that would be on your conscious all the time seems to me.

When I marry I hedge my bets and wear a many-layered blue satin dress. A dress that is not a wedding dress to begin with and requires a seamstress to painstakingly take apart a few layers in order to add a bustle to the train. The dark fabric a near match to an archived fragment I find of a dress worn for a wedding in 1727. It’s so trite it’s true: something old + something new + something borrowed + something—. I am many garments and more moons away from becoming a mother who has recently—. Who could possibly know burial garments are most often made from white wedding dresses stripped back to their nearly pre-stitched state. My one, unwhite dress that doesn’t save me.

Rose did not care about the moon, she liked the stars. Once someone told her that the stars were round and she wished that they had not told her.

From a set of potential art/artists sent across the ocean for her consideration, Gertrude Stein chose the same illustrator for her children’s book, The World is Round, as the one who would go on to paint Margaret Wise Brown’s iconic great green room in Goodnight Moon. A room that has been celebrated and criticized for looking like no one’s childhood room ever. Though this is apparently untrue. The great green room was inspired by details of Brown’s own childhood nursery. Right down to the decorated tiles around the fireplace. It should be no surprise to find it was the future author of Goodnight Moon who suggested some adult authors might write splendid children’s books and solicited her favorite. Or to learn that her favorite was none other than the inimitable Stein. Goodnight Moon’s staccato repetition and rhymes deconstruct the lavish modernist-ness of the Steinian line into lullaby—stripped down to a child’s wild and simple declarations, preserving the fabric of syntactical play while letting each individual sound really sing rather than be saturated by proximity to so many other Steinian syllables. Goodnight stars  Goodnight air  Goodnight noises everywhere. Brown’s uncanny ability to capture children’s worlds using a child’s perspective of words.

Originally conservators used flashlights to peer inside the neck or wrist openings, but that process revealed little about how the suits were actually built. “But short of taking them apart we really couldn’t tell what was going on inside.” Of course, deconstructing an intricately made suit puts major stress on the material, so they looked to X-ray technology to do the task.

+ Xerox
+ knock off
+ ghost story

Dickinson’s one, white dress is a + copy. Of which there are actually two. Dickinson’s one, white + twin replica dresses—makes three. Three white dresses are not a myth. They are the beginning of a bedtime story: Once upon a time there were three white dresses— acceptable to wear outside the house though not in society, sewn in a 19th-century style called a wrapper, meant for house work and hard wear and more often made of darker fabric. Though obviously not Dickinson’s. Each of Dickinson’s one, white dresses were patterned and sewn by her or other women with an intensity and intimacy that has long since been lost to the advent of mass-produced clothing. Along with her reason for such dazzling fabric. But a historical artifact cannot be taken apart at the seams in order to make a pattern for twinning. The dressmaker hired to twice replicate Dickinson’s one, white dress had to imagine the pattern from seeing the full dress already together. Had to plan it backwards. The language of reproducing a dress without a pattern + the language of the writer at work: drafted, corrected, proofed. The hardest part—finding enough antique embroidered trim. Three dresses with extra trimming along the collar, the cuffs, the unexpected note-sized pockets. Only one with handmade lace. Dickinson’s one, white + twin dresses resting on a dress form in the east bedroom of her house—arms bent as if about to take off.

Stanza 8:
You understand the + spacesuit in stanza one is mine,
my one white + spacesuit in which I’ll never
shine

The longer we are in quarantine the deeper our resentment for visitors who fail to scrub in correctly or long enough—who might pose a life-or-death risk because they are lazy. Because their baby is mostly fine and doesn’t need to fear bacteria or a failure to fight off some common microbe. And isn’t forgetting every few hours how to breathe. Possibly one of those horrible families whose baby was born on time but just has some small issue so they are in the NICU for monitoring. These babies are species from another planet. They are watching the moon from afar. As a televised scene. We, on the other hand, are stranded. We have another daughter at home—too young, and too germy, to be allowed to come with us. We quietly seethe at the people who fail to scrub in carefully but the ones that crush us are those carrying infant car seats—marking them as people whose babies are about to return to Earth.

In the great gray room There is no telephone No red balloon No picture of cows jumping over the moon. There are no flowers or congratulatory cards No bags full of tissue paper and clothes for the tiny arrival. There is nothing shining. No comb no brush. No quiet old rabbit whispering hush. In the great gray room There is a pair of hospital beds, a recovering new mother, and a resident repeatedly requesting a signature for burying the dead.

+

Down from the birthing ward through the automatic doors—inside an isolette unit as germless as the surface of the moon—our surviving twin daughter, bathed in unearthly blue light to break down her dangerous bilirubin. The first three days she is alive her face is hidden beneath a mask protecting her retinas. The next ten weeks of her life she survives in a quarantine made popular by a doctor at a sideshow at Luna Park on Coney Island—each day thousands of people paying to press their faces to the spectacle behind the incubator’s glass, to peer in at the infinitesimal preemies wrinkled up inside.

After we planted our stitch-work on the moon did we have a better understanding of the likely bacterialessness of space? In a rare moment alone in the bath, the narrator of a famous 1985 dystopian novel desires to scrub her self away: I wish to be totally clean, germless, without bacteria, like the surface of the moon. Every so often there are reports of bacteria found on the exterior of the International Space Station that were undocumented before launch. It is hard not to simply rule these out as resilient Earth microorganisms, accidental contamination hitching a ride in the fold of a seam. We are, after all, formed from this wild collision—how can we expect to tell the dust of ourselves from ourselves.

Goodnight nobody

Rosa was her name and for days we called her Unofficially
Rosa and the nurses all called her Unofficially Rosa and why
couldn’t we make it official they said? When does Unofficially
Rosa become officially a Rosa and when does a Rosa become
unofficially a twin.

I tell you at this time the moon was all round and
I would go on it around and around.

Every year I tell you every year we celebrate Rosa having gone
round and round and we put up a large banner that says:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY UNOFFICIALLY ROSA

+

She would have been Rosa if her name had not
been Rosa. She would have been Rosa if she had been a twin.
Rosa is her name is her name.

And I think I’d like to go into space. And I’d like to wear our own suit that we make. I think I could depend on it

+

What is a variant if not the refusal of an epitaph’s eternal concision, the opposite of the monument with its haughty typography. A variant is an expansion. A going-on-forever. A text re-animated + revived again and again in the act of revision and fine-tuning of its fabric. Dickinson’s variants stitched across her poems to correct distortion and calibrate interior vastness. Turn the envelope and the folded seam splits the envelope into an open-winged bird. Turn it again and the map takes you across another horizon entirely.

+

When [  ] finishes her dress
it is the shape of what has come
to rescue her. She puts it on.