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  • Robyn Maree Pickens (bio)

I bring you off the line damp around the ears & elbows.Look at this face. What is enlightenment?

I drink rooibos by lamplight—drying the cuffsof your purple shirt on the heater. These are my cells

pawing with want. Listen to their yolk. I read wordsto draw you in close under this orange lamp, this oil heater—

the smell of the day on your available skin. What do we dowith this now? Who are we beside each other? Enlightenment

has done little for us. If I saw you on the street a strangerI could look through to your wild scent—

smell you on the forest floor with the dank—gather pinecones & pass over past lives. [End Page 266]

Robyn Maree Pickens

Robyn Maree Pickens is a PhD candidate in ecological aesthetics at the University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her poetry has appeared in SAND (2018), Cordite (2018), Plumwood Mountain (2018), Matador Review (2017), and Jacket 2 (2017) and at ARTSPACE, Auckland (2018). Her poetry criticism has appeared in Rain Taxi (2018) and Jacket 2 (2017). She was a finalist of the 2018 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize, judged by Eileen Myles, and the winner of the takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize 2018. This is her first appearance in Antipodes.

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