Northern Bling

Annie Law

Frozen diesel mud is
shinier than you’d think
chest high wild rose plates
tuck into a new truck that says
warm fresh tough clean
your favorite expensive underwear

Frozen diesel mud is
shinier than you’d think
chest high wild rose plates
tuck into a new truck that says
warm fresh tough clean
your favorite expensive underwear

We are here for the money

long days bright lights
and free food
a movie set except the
director lives in Calgary

money has a new kind of smell
like minus thirty five
smoking inside hot hardwire
garbage on fire

We are here for the money

that raven looks pissed
but it’s all we can do to
keep the bears sleeping
don’t wake the environmentalist

We are here for the money

cold metal hot blooded steel toes
melt twelve hours later
hair gel and cologne
in a bent mirror
polished raw by somebody’s
paycheck lacquer it up

We are here for the money

apply another coat dry out harder
smell good there are women in town
greasy thawed hands steam
nice achey watch wrist
crack dark sweaty ready knuckles

We spend money too

giddy up there are women in town
don’t wake the rest
ice cubes wink under four shots
of everything I got

Annie Law is an enthusiasm expert from Vancouver. Her favourite things are glamour and grit, and she likes to look for the places they intersect. Then, sometimes, Annie writes poetry about it.

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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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