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## Canada Day Snapshot, 2004

alex boyd

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Hurricane. By Miles Storey. From “The Ex,” a photo essay published in Spacing (Fall 2011). Miles Storey is a designer and photographer. He regularly contributes to Spacing and Torontoist.

From The Least Important Man, published by Biblioasis in 2012. Alex Boyd writes poems, fiction, reviews and essays. His work has been published in the Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire, and at nthposition.com.

I’m a part of Canada, maybe a corpuscle

doing laundry, noting the constant position

of the homeless man, laundromat rambler,

standing rigidly on guard, looking out the window

saying got no tools slap the bitch, and so on

before he walks over to politely ask, Excuse me,

do you have the time? as though he takes fifteen-

minute breaks, goes back to having an exposed heart

like a plum on the sidewalk. Out there, streetcars,

a red and white blur of steel, grumbling

and hushing, giving birth to people all the way

down the street, tucked into the effort of their lives,

the difficult bloodstream of a proud nation.

Down the street I smile at a bald man in a window

putting soup into his potato face, fire trucks with

boots in overalls squatting on each side as though

firefighters dissolved. Another piece of Canada

close to home, in the shape of an old woman

on her way to Chinatown, arms around groceries,

a tiny receipt flutters in her hand, celebrating wildly.