On Promising to Buy Only Previously Owned Clothes

Give me precision if only for the most finite of tasks,
the shallowest of missions: to wear each thrift store,

each flea market garment like second skin
until I hear the breath above each stitch, what

accelerated the heart at the spindle, what
clouded the lung, what caught in the whirring

machine, who found enough left in them to sing.
Did their fingers, too, callus with needlework

until they lost their whorls, like Mrs. Wong’s?
When time came to ‘naturalize,’ hers had no prints

to prove who she was. Silver cotton, hemp, tencel, flax,
petroleum and army of polymers, feed my greed

the ghosts of each thread, soft and arsenic.