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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

Lament for a Sweater

 

A pocket knife, a set of keys …

these are things I could believe

I would misplace — I would not grieve

a set of keys; I would replace them.

But a sweater, shrunken at the sleeves, and bleached

at the collar, with a zipper so precocious

I could not coax the thing to feed — and I tried! —

should not have gone the way it did; it should have died

in the great life cycle in which all great sweaters die,

torn and sewn a thousand times.

My once black sweater, patched and grey …

I left it on the trunk of the car that drove away.

Ben Hackman is the founding editor of The Molotov Rag, Toronto’s anarchist quarterly. His work has appeared in Jones Avenue and is forthcoming in Canadian Literature.

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