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From the archives

Carbon Copy

In equal balance justly weighed

Dangerous Grounds

Coming soon to a democracy near you

Tax and the Canadian Psyche

Elsbeth Heaman in conversation with Shirley Tillotson

Stanza Is the Italian Word for Room

 

(on benedict’s retirement, how i learned to stop worrying and love the catholic church)

It is so holy to be old.

(Vires meas ingravescente aetate non iam aptas esse.)

My grandma in her white carpet stanza

refuses to install track lighting (it’s tacky)

to highlight the glitter in her dying eyes.

 

Opa shared his final stanza with two strangers,

crippled fingers scrawling fugues on scrap paper,

unable to unfold his fingers over the keys.

 

Oma in her condo marvels at the skytrain,

popeye pizza and hoards dietary supplements

in her kitchen drawer.

 

Uncle Morris in the Okanagan sun stanza

still smiled when his sister-in-law

whispered chess into his large lobed ear

while Aunt Barbara refuses to visit,

walking with one glass eye

in the empty lots

in Lumby

where she said his spirit lived.

 

Then Uncle George just dying

in his diapers, losing his dreams

of a whites only golf course

as a swift fingered filapina

sponged his slack limbs.

 

Finally you, benedict, your shoulders

bent forward in heavy red,

a supplicant posture, just another

broken holy father.

 

Jennifer Zilm lives in East Vancouver where she works in libraries and social housing. She is the author of the chapbook The Whole and Broken Yellows (Frog Hollow Press, 2013). Her first full-length collection, Waiting Room, will be published by BookThug in 2016.

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