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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

Ship’s Prow Is the Cubist Slate They Call a Face

 

Sopped in chrysanthemum, she bows in, singing

stanzas from Atlantic shanties. Gold-leafed,

 

plank-walker’s wet dream, to see the wood fold slip,

copper nipples milk green towards the ocean’s glass.

 

Her scapulae of wing and rope, low sails curtain

for her encore as she tailgates the grimaced sun.

 

No one knows about the shimmy she does at dusk,

the way she houses blowfish as they lift for curtsies

 

at her bust. King crabs collect the dowries of her

devotees: albatross and porpoise. So slightly

 

cracked she bends towards the waistline

of a milk-dawn, doesn’t know East from

 

South, her sunken prow regains momentum

as she sinks to see the prismed coral of a shipwreck.

Robin Richardson is the author of Knife Throwing Through Self- Hypnosis (ECW Press, 2013) and Grunt of the Minotaur (Insomniac Press, 2011). She has been shortlisted for the ReLit award and longlisted for the CBC Poetry Award, and won the John B. Santoianni Award and the Joan T. Baldwin Award. She holds a master of fine arts in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and currently divides her time between Toronto and New York.

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