by Talia Tucker

There’s a dress in the back of my closet, yellowed like an old baseball card. It had been hand-sewn by my grandmother, the perfectly plotted stitches the work of a mother and wife. Only her children had grown up and her husband had left. “She never even used patterns,” Daddy would always say. But at night, she’d turn plates to shards against walls. Then, she’d clean up, wipe her face, and sew her sadness into dresses. My father has never understood her melancholy, but I feel it growing inside me every day, passed down like an heirloom.

Talia Tucker is a writer based out of New Jersey. She comes from a mixed Korean and Jamaican background, which inspires a lot of her writing as well as a lot of questions from strangers. She has a BA from Rutgers University in Communication and an MA in Liberal Studies from Loyola University Maryland. Talia’s work can be found on her website, taliatucker.net.