Reading Room

He Wants Me to Describe It

The winner of Room's 2002 poetry contest, judged by Joelene Heathcote. My friend wants to know what I think of when I panic. I pause in front of lit shop windows of long wrap-around scarves, beaded necklines and Indian silks. Absence, abandonment are the words but...

A Visit

The second-place winner of our 2001 poetry contest. at Christmas I stare and stare at your daughters who look so eerily like you. your older girl seems all right, I know you’d be glad. she’s a regular kid, plays with ponies, laughs in shrieks. it’s only sometimes I...

Pink Lilies

The winner of our 2001 poetry contest. You are a woman who lusts after pink lilies, the open mouths of inlets blurred by mist. Nothing is ever simple. A man who says he loves his wife but runs his hands over you. You stamp and shiver, steam like a horse in rain. You...

Hot

She is waiting for the end of another beginning, woman, always changing: now the heat is in the core. She is waiting for the end of another beginning, woman, always changing: now the heat is in the core. She is saying goodbye to the moon’s pull, rhythm of tides;...

Chicken

I think I smell like alcohol. I’m sitting, eating a doughnut and thinking about last night. I wonder if my liver is O.K.; if I keep this up, I’ll kill myself. No, if I keep this up, I’ll become my mother. I think I smell like alcohol. I’m sitting, eating a doughnut...

Regina Leigh

Slivers of cut grass stick to my calves and hands. Sweat soaks my bra. I am sweating. Not glowing, as Mom calls it. Sweating. I want the dirt, the remains of our lawn, off me. It hasn’t been mowed in months and is taking over what little landscaping we have. No one...

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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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