The Red Sweater

In “The Red Sweater” time is, quite literally, a commodity. The speaker looks at the piece of clothing on his body and slows down to consider what it cost. The poem never mentions a specific dollar figure, however. Instead, the speaker says, “for me / to have it my mother worked twenty / hours at the fast-food joint” (Lines 3-5). He is wearing his mother’s time and effort.

In the weave of the sweater, the speaker sees her at work and breaks the time down into other metrics. “In a twenty hour period my mother waits / on hundreds of customers” (Lines 11-12) and “pushes / each order under ninety seconds” (Lines 12-13). Her time at work is not idle—almost every second seems to be counted and given to the company.

The poem talks about prep time, “the lull before rush hours” (Line 15) when the re-fried beans are mashed. In the longest line of the poem that seems to mimic the length of the day, he asks, “How many burritos can one make in a continuous day?” (Line 18). Her days are measured by how much product she moves, the pounds of ingredients she processes, the items she cooks. The speaker thinks about the working conditions, the room’s “pressing heat melting her make-up” (Line 16) and the physical challenge: “ How do her wrists / sustain the scraping, lifting, and flipping / of meat patties?” (Lines 20-22).

The poem stresses that the twenty hours—the amount of time it took to earn the money to buy the sweater—are “merely links / in the chain of days startingly similar” (Lines 23-24). This is not a short term, one-time occurrence. Her days begin “in the blue morning” (Line 25) and stretch out to repeat the same sequence.

The poem looks at time as something sold to survive and provide. It considers time as an investment in the future and as an offering of support. It invites its readers to look at how labor is valued and count what items truly cost beyond monetary value.