POETRY: ERIN ROBINSONG

PLACES 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.