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Elizabeth Robinson in Response to Kristen Hanlon

​Resistance is Key
 
 
 
Who said that I should address you
in this manner
 
after so many years
 
away?  Is your hair
 
now as long as your children
are grown?
 
 
 
Who made the decision that they
 
should be born?  Not their mother,
 
father.
 
 
Or is birth itself an act of resistance
 
the same way the making
 
of a poem is always
 
an act committed under duress?
 
 
 
To accept birth specifically:
to be born, to invite oneself
 
to the invitation.
 
 
To resist is to be homesick.
To be homesick
 
 
for what we got we deserved.
 
 


In Time, All Fragments Become Love Letters
 
 
Change of address.
 
 
What arrives
arrives misdirected.
 
 
Crease and greasemark.
Paper cut.
Warble of water stain.
 
 
 
Love was resemblance.
 
 
A broken thing recognizes its former self;
replenishes.
 
 
 
The love letter was an awkward, miniature
dictionary of cognates.
 
 
Sounds like, sounds like:
the texture of it under the fingertips.
 
 
First the memory, then the growing
familiarity
 
of an accent.  Its
 
 
soft lust, the adhesive
eroded from the flap of the envelope
 
crossed by the tongue so many times.
 
 

 
 
Sadness Improves Your Memory
 
 
Day follows after day, tidy but with slight overlaps.
 
Memory was a series of days.
 
Memory was preoccupation--
 
days previously occupied
 
and hence their sadness.
 
 
 
Sadness was not personal, but an immense
 
organism—the world’s largest—decaying
 
into memory.
 
 
 
In Hygeine, Colorado, also:
 
the world’s largest cottonwood.  It died
 
before I got there.  But I climbed it anyway,
 
scraped my forearm on its
 
 
many days.  The insects and birds
 
remembered that they continued to live
 
there.  The tree’s occupation followed it
 
 
 
into death, therefore , the scientists
 
came to study it.  Told me to get down.
 
*
 
Logic, like days, desires order and receives itself
 
with slight overlaps.
 
 
The way death and life are not discrete categories.
 
The way in which the tree seemed to be dead while it hosted
 
so much life.
 
 
 
Sadness is a form of logic, par excellence.  An extended
 
and intricate syllogism that rounds back on itself, just as
 
a root system that circulates through the organism is
 
also a form of memory.  Also.
 
 
Also. 
 
 
Someone may tell you to get down, and you recollect
 
the way you climbed up.  Also refusal demonstrates
 
the excellence of memory.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Replacement Clouds
 
 
                                                 “how commitment to repetition is default construction”
                                                                                                                    —Randy Prunty
 
 
 
Clouds.
 
 
Once
 
 
I was an agent of recognition.
 
 
I looked up:
 
sharks,
 
goats,
 
balloon dogs,
 
collapsing roofs.
 
 
 
Then I was an agent of cognition.
 
 
Collapsing roofs.
 
 
 
A hand, potentially mine, pulls a tuft
 
of fur from the dog and it lofts up to the clouds.
 
 
 
 
 
Cloud as weather while insubordinate to weather..
 
Cloudy vector of resemblance, of gesture:
 
“Looks like:”
 
 
Cloud steeped in unreality
 
like a tea bag in hot water.
 
 
 
Resemblance begins to look like
 
 
its own cycle.  Possessive.
 
 
 
The steam rising from the cup
 
to the cloud.    Repeating its own
 
construction.  Because cliché
 
 
 
looks like resemblance
 
until the weather shifts.  The excess
 
 
squeezed
 
from the cloud, tea spilling
 
 
in drops that commit themselves
 
to something other than repetition,
 
 
the relief that breaks through resemblance.
 
Discarded wad of fur matted with it.
​



​Elizabeth Robinson used to live in the Bay Area, where she saw Kristen Hanlon around and about and liked her poems.  She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado where she works as a court advocate for homeless people.  Robinson’s most recent books are Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing) and On Ghosts (Solid Objects). This past October, she was a fellow at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France.

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Email

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