12/10/2020 POETRY: DAVID WALTNER-TOEWSSURVIVING THE CATASTROPHE 1 The rough beasts crash and lumber, scales flashing, brilliant in the falling sun. When they swing their great heads, this way, and that, scanning for danger, we still ourselves. We are but notions beavering into shadows, biding time, too small to merit even their disdain. They rise up fiercely tall and stupid, then slouch off toward Washington, Jerusalem, Beijing, Berlin, Moscow, claiming for themselves, this devastated paradise, raging at the meteoric gods. We flee from the Jurassic chaos into tunnels of anticipated spring. Huddled, nibbling ideas--their roots, their rotting leaves– we sip our wine, and craft a plan: first we take New Mexico. Then we take our time. [1] The poem is based on the life of Kimbetopsalis simmonsae, a small, herbivorous, beaver-like mammal that survived the event that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Its fossil was found in what is today New Mexico. A veterinary epidemiologist, David Waltner-Toews has published more than 20 books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. His most recent book (nonfiction) is On Pandemics: Deadly Diseases from Bubonic Plague to Coronavirus (Greystone, 2020). His poetry books have been published by McClelland and Stewart, Brick Books, and Turnstone Press. More information can be found on his website: https://davidwaltnertoews.wordpress.com/
12/10/2020 POETRY: ERIN ROBINSONGPLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM No one kept watch, except all of us. We made human chains we wrote operas we conducted interviews and released the data and started smoking again, bought up everything we could just to stop it, it didn’t we found hope anyway then lost the case, we lay on our backs and just floated. We saw 150 species a day go extinct we did not want to be people we were tired of talking we started singing we said maybe it’s over, we delivered a formal apology to the salmon did a controversial pregnant photoshoot in front of a nuclear reactor, all those nice curves we made page 15 of the New York Times, ok and delighted in the letters to the editor that said I was ‘going to give my baby cancer’ well exactly then got scared and moved but it was everywhere we went like my unstable worth rolling oblongly on pink shadows of information glamping among the facts. Friends came and were astronomies. Self-deploying flora volunteered. This morning the sun of god shone on the chasmogamous violets and the world continues in great detail. What shall I do with my information I’m an animal in an animal in an animal I’m a poem of objects that live by magic* I’m every idea I ever had, I’ll just stay here as a person. I have a photographic mouth * Anna Mendelssohn WORLD WAR Thinking is my fighting, said Virginia Woolf, in the middle of war Are we in the middle of war A war with the sea A war with the air Who will wear what the world wore Lucid and wetly speaking There’s no war you idiots learn the language hot pink sex you don’t need money Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. Her debut collection of poetry, Rag Cosmology (Book*hug), won the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and her work has been published in Lemon Hound, Vallum, The Capilano Review, Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, among others. Collaborative performance works with Hanna Sybille Müller and Andréa de Keijzer include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; revolutions; and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies (forthcoming spring 2020, at Tangente). Originally from Cortes Island, Erin lives in Montréal.
12/10/2020 POETRY: JESSICA BEBENEKDEER I wanted to write a poem about a deer but by the time I got around to it, I think it was probably already dead. I guess that makes this an elegy. I watched it through the chain-link fence with my fingers clawed around the diamond-outline of its metal- etched body, darting through the crooks of electrical towers. No, he was a stag, big, with antlers, and with ink- deep eyes that I could look into and I would feel them like he was looking into me and not bleating with his eyes shut. He kept reeling around on his two back legs and his soft browns looked grey like the grass and the pile of concrete cylinders to the right. His nose kept spraying out these puffs of hot sleet and there was all this steam coming off his back. I could see the meat pulsing around his bones. I wanted to call someone to catch him, help him, or—I wanted to grab someone’s arms hard and tell them he needed help. I wanted to press my palms flat on his wet, shaking body. I wanted to help him. Instead, I watched him smack his hooves off a path of broken asphalt slabs and disappear down the drooping rows of thick black cables. Previously published in The Rusty Toque, Nov. 2013 Jessica Bebenek is a writer, bookmaker, & interdisciplinary artist living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), unceded land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. Her creative work can be found in PRISM, Prairie Fire, CV2, Arc, and Grain, among other places. Her third poetry chapbook, Fourth Walk, was published by Desert Pets Press in 2017, and her collection of knitting patterns for poems, k2tog, was released by Berlin’s Broken Dimanche Press in 2019. She works as a writer, teacher, and bookmaker, and is currently completing a full-length poetry collection, No One Knows Us There.
@notyrmuse www.jessicabebenek.art |
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