Mother Earth at the bar

Anna Swanson

Truth be told, sometimes she gets bored
of the bowing down, all that blessing her
with gentle hands. Come night
she wants to wade through a mess of hips and eyes

Truth be told, sometimes she gets bored
of the bowing down, all that blessing her
with gentle hands. Come night
she wants to wade through a mess of hips and eyes
in her finest leather and she wants to wear it
live: horns, hooves and fury intact.
She wants to walk into a bar
the way some people walk into a swamp—
everything pushes against you in the dark
and no one cares who you are.
Just for one night she doesn’t want to hear
voluptuous, fertile, abundant.
She wants someone to walk up to her
like a forest fire. Say to her:
You fine fat bitch of a woman,
I hope you like it up the ass.

Anna Swanson lives in Vancouver, where she is studying to be a librarian. Her poetry has been published in various journals, including Grain, CV2, PRISM International, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire.

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ROOM 49.3 NO CANADA

In the new era of CanCon, as feminists and writers it is our task to reject this Canadian exceptionalism, this too-comfortable back-patting. How can we begin to imagine alternative arts economies, Indigenous economies around art, that start with treaty, that align with BDS? What art, what literature, would such a system free us to create?

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Cover image for Room Magazine Issue 49.2, Science. Art by Candace Cosentino of an old-fashioned computer monitor with a bounty of dandelions growing from it.

ROOM 49.2 Science

Welcome to the Science issue of Room Magazine, where we privilege questions: questions about how to construct better worlds; questions about how to destroy hyper-capitalistic, necropolitical systems; questions that beget questions and new questions.

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