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Snapshots
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A NEW VOLUPTUARY Once I was fearful of the growing season -- in a dark place, we don't want to see the way green things reach and grope. Such hopefulness coiled in every cell, such energetic, muscular striving. We don't want to hear the fey twitters of feathered bombs that drop from the sky to bounce on lawns with legs like springs, or hear the ticking of sprinklers, a signal of heat waves to come, and we certainly don't want the scent of jasmine, stronger by night, and a hell of a tease besides, nor the caress of a wind that at once flatters and beguiles. And the taste of salted skin pressed to skin firmly as lips meet lips? Bunkum. Balderdash! Now, now I'm not so sure. Such provocations can't always go unnoticed, be ignored. Why not reach for June's strawberries that shiver redly in the skins they're in, or thrust feet into sand, or step outside ourselves the way light breaks through stained glass and falls in colored shadow on the walkway that promises gardens beyond? Jenniffer L. Lesh 2 June 2004 Bakersfield, Calif. USA Like phantom ladders made of water, heat rises from the street. _Sun devils_, your mom calls it, and her gaze goes back- wards to Tennessee and the swelter, mud cakes patted dry with her sister, toes dangling in a ditch. But here's a dry heat, a fraudulent desert that sends mutant trees shooting towards a sky only seen in 50's postcards. Fading, mellowed. To feel nostalgia for a place you still live in means you've got one foot out the door, means now may be the last chance to burn your back to snakeskin ribbons. Or the last season the wisteria ripens fat cocoon pods you and your mother pick to dry, snugging up against the future, that bedeviling future you divine like water. Jenniffer Lesh 16 June 2004 Bakersfield, Calif. She's been avoiding me for months, the stooped elf-woman who lives next door in her mother's house, her mother now buried. Never-married, hair close-cropped and Groucho's eyebrows without the irony. But eyes startling, like Liz Taylor's. A nervelet, she rakes for hours -- the sound of sycamore leaves skittering, nervous as an introvert's hands. Hostile, back and forth, coiling a question that's meant for effect, not to be answered. When I meet her blues over the crumbling wall, it's all nicey-nice from me, all how'dos and cooing for grapefruits bigger than fists. And she never looks at me, but plucks a stray dead vine (mine) from the wall (her dad built) and says for the umpteenth-ever time she wishes I'd take down the eucalyptus that hunches its raw back against her wall (again, her dad built it from bricks and mortar and, one imagines, blood). _See the cracks_. She traces with a dirty glove and the eyes are downcast but roil fiercely in their net of lines. _Or maybe the lady who buys your place_. Suggesting there's always one who comes after, a parade of haughty women with overblown curls and overgrown trees that drip wisteria and jasmine like laughter upon her. Jennifer L. Lesh 23 June 2004 Bakersfield, Calif. Poetryetc is a listserv relating to poetry and poetics which provides a forum for poets to debate their critical and creative work. The list has over the years run a number of projects for its members, of which Snapshots has been the most enduring. Every Wednesday, Poetryetc members were invited to post short poems on any subject or in any form they chose. The idea was to make a poetic collage of instamatic “snaps” of that day that reflected the international membership of the list. The project has generated an astounding number of poems. The first two runs, of six weeks each, and the first ten weeks of the third run, are archived at Wild Honey Press www.wildhoneypress.com under Poetryetc Project. The rest - amounting in all to a run of a year - are archived here. Poetryetc, like its affiliate Salt Publishing (http://www.saltpublishing.com), was founded by Australian poet John Kinsella. Salt is managed by Christopher Hamilton-Emery (cemery@saltpublishing.com), while Poetryetc is owned by Alison Croggon (ajcroggon@bigpond.com). Poetryetc is now archived at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/poetryetc.html. and anyone interested can join from that url. To contact the listowner: Alison Croggon These pages are designed, maintained, and hosted by Rebecca Seiferle, the Editor of The Drunken Boat. To email. 
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