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Snapshots
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Panic among the window-makers.
The internal stream presents itself. What matters is at what point to intervene. I'm reading on the john. A fly buzzes around me, and I think to swat it with the paper, and then imagine a pink smear of fly jam on the page, absently rubbing it with my finger and just as absently tasting. And the thought, through attachment to a memory that serves for matrix, transforms to "absent the mind, Renfrew eats flies." Can one eat one's fly and have it? Mark Weiss USA, 2.42pm, 7/23/03 It's a sense of decorum causes us to divide the vegetables * Left to right right to left she rubs her nose. * Away from home and other bteeth wsill eat my tomatoes. * Almost the white of the oleander just a hint of green but nonetheless becomes invisible when it folds its wings. Something here, I guess it guesses, would eat a butterfly. * A scant rain, discrete drops, a hammer-blow to a hummingbird. * The second generation of flowers on my night-blooming cereus wait for dark, a flower a night, and between its ridges tiny snails suck for nutriment. Mark Weiss San Diego, USA, 7/30/03 THE REVENGE OF ARTIFICE AGAINST ITS MAKERS Hummingbird sits on a sharp spear of yucca, surveys the garden for intruders. It has sugar, and sugar is power. Here in America in exchange for universal hatred we get cheap goods made by slaves. What? you wanted something for nothing? And if I were a bird I would fly-- As perfect as the rock would let them, given their skill. The rules by which one liquid penetrates another. From which upsprings-- Do you mind? I'm fisting a chicken. Is it bestiality if the bird is dead? Mark Weiss THE LURE 1 She wears her heart on her left breast, pink as her nipple, as her organdy dress, and pierced by an arrow that could be the hook for whatever fish. Try not to look at it, she says, try not to touch it. 2 Later she tells me that she wears her heart to keep her students focused on what she has to teach them. Mark Weiss, USA Today an ocean wind peels back the overcast, so that the wall of smoke stands off to the east, at the fire's landward edge. Beneath it abandoned villages, some consumed, the survivors report, in moments, the fire so hot it melted cars. Houses scattered amidst firs and pines, long meadows of yellow grasses peppered with cattle, wildflowers, low-flying birds, buzzards and hawks above, gone now. One village is crowded with men and equipment: they've made a stand, and helicopters drop buckets of water. The fire shoots shards of flame across roads around and above the heads of the men. Maybe there will be some acres of green amidst the charcoal, maybe not, and maybe the sun will rise tomorrow. Mark Weiss San Diego The soil burned black. In places an overlay of ash where a tree had been, stretched in the direction of the wind, as if the wind had left its shadow in passing. In other places where there had been no wind and a slow burn a small circle, a dome the color of bones, perhaps an inch above the blackened soil, the footprint of the missing tree marked for the moment (until the next wind) by what the fire left. Mark Weiss Hanging on her every word and hearing not a one, he thinks that none of her characteristics are secondary. Mark Sculling clubs upon Yarra. All-girl crews in blue-and-white jerseys the cox in red and on a bike path a coach with a bullhorn "square your shoulders, girls." All manner of birds not known—this one the size of a small pigeon white underside black back and a black bib the rest pied feeds on the bank the beck of bug and worm, the look of a bug and worm eater. I make it fly so as to see that its wings are striped white. Elegant small black legs black eyes. Right next to me it grabs a worm and swallows. A magpie lark. Hark hark. Knees to chest the breast flattened, vulva presented. "And stroke!" Make a muddy track by the river. Presuppose that it's dusk and cloudy on the cusp of Spring, the city all around us. Black swans with red beaks, a horizontal band of white at the tip. They feed on grasses. Mark Weiss "The oldest pub in town," the tv says. And the smiling barmaid: "It was the wild west," she says, "Wyatt Earp" she says "drank here, there was a brothel upstairs." Pleasure for some, for others not. She smiles, her teeth are perfect, her eyes glisten. How'd you have liked it, I think, that work upstairs. Mark Weiss, somewhere in the USA 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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