From the Archive: Robin Richardson (CAROUSEL 35)

Staff/ November 30, 2020/ Poem

ROBIN RICHARDSON

We’re Just Beasts with Big Brains

Tipsy on the stoop beside a stone dog, faithful as the hurricane
       that claimed his face. It’s okay. The sidewalk’s arching orange
towards a chanting patch of shrubbery; it chants your name.
Or does it state the ways of gods, or god, or something worse?
I have misread myself for years: open as an infant crow below the worm.
At my feet some German Shepherd, older than his owner, begs
to be embraced. He has your face. I don’t trust this path,
       how cogent its ascent, how calm. I trust the tangle of its swan:
her skyward glance a spire, wingspan something one could worship
       under, blundering as one does in new idolatry.

Robin Richardson is the author of four collections of poetry, including Sit How You Want (Véhicule Press, 2019), winner of the Trillium Book Award, and is Editor-in-Chief at Minola Review. Her work has appeared in Salon, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Walrus, Hazlitt, Best Canadian Poetry and Tin House, among others. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, has won the Fortnight Poetry Prize in the U.K., The John B. Santorini Award, The Joan T. Baldwin Award, and has been shortlisted for the CBC, Walrus and ARC Poetry Prizes. More: here + here

We’re Just Beasts with Big Brains
appeared in CAROUSEL 35 (2015) — buy it here

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