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      January 29, 2013Let’s SayRhoda Janzen

      Let’s say a long-time friend of a friend has
      an Emmy in her living room. Her hair,
      the welcome mat of decades, sheds its fuzz
      like the smell of doobie, faint but everywhere.
      Let’s say you really like this woman, and
      that after several non-alcoholic beers
      she’s back in the day with photos of the band.
      Now here’s your friend, but minus forty years.
      At twenty he’s embarrassingly young,
      sprawled in a lawnchair, grinning, his first wife
      adorable, a pretty child among
      children. They’re high, or maybe high on life,
      at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. Friends
      like these accrue the usual dividends:
      divorce, success, everyone knocked over
      with a feather when that guy on the far left
      became a periodontist. Your lover,
      with losses of his own, is not bereft;
      he goes on living in the here and now.
      Time scalds him lightly as atomic mist.
      Let’s say that this photo changes things somehow.
      You can’t shake off the sober sense of past,
      its shadow stretching backward from your feet,
      the long bad hair of it, like sharp surprise
      of waking up to chickadees and heat
      when just before you opened up your eyes,
      let’s say you dreamed of winter in the dawn,
      your parka zipped and your galoshes on.

       

      from #37 - Summer 2012

      Rhoda Janzen was featured in conversation in this issue.