Tuesday poem #546 : Erin Robinsong : FERAL PRAYER

I give up. I give up asking. I give up asking for anything

less than billions of gills sporulating revolution’s pheromone.

The trash of civilization is who I love. Anything less than

billions of salmon returning themselves to the forest.

All I ask are rivers, predictable flowering seasons, storm

corridors & wet wide will to surge the brilliance we are

omitting in the practice of citizenry to a system who hates

99% of itself. Big black cat of the heavens, purr this numbness

to death. My civilization suppresses weeds as much as women

so weeds grow to the size of the sky & rain down seeds on our

heads so pharma is free, so loneliness undoes among monocrops

in eruptions of yellow. The alternative is wind so strong I fear

the trees thrashing at the edge of ability to hold on & flex

losing bits of themselves on the roof like us losers –

colossal loss is us, is the alternative to a pulse of salmon,

a peristalsis of wings. Great undulation of oceans, retilt

brainwaves glitched in place & make intelligence surge

in the stupidest places of this situation of waves, salmon

streams & sky, by way of orgasm & plasma & everything

unfinished, so life stays alive I give up asking for anything

less than this kiss

 

 

 

 

Erin Robinsong is a poet and interdisciplinary artist working with ecological imagination. She is the author of Rag Cosmology, winner the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and Wet Dream (Brick Books, 2022). Collaborative performance works with Andréa de Keijzer and Hanna Sybille Müller include This ritual is not an accident; Facing away from that which is coming; revolutions and Polymorphic Microbe Bodies. 

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan