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Poem by Carol Jenkins

Carol Jenkins lives in Sydney, concocts images (one of which is above) and writes various fiction, interspersed with facts, some of which are remnants from her former career in chemical regulation and assessment.

Her work has appeared in journals including Heat, Island, Cordite, Quadrant, Snorkel and Otolith, and will soon be broad-and-podcast on Radio Adelaide’s Writers Radio.


Eyewear welcomes her this Friday.



Esters on a Tree Dark Morning

The day starts early, some phantom interloper
firing colour off, lows the clouds
to a weasel wrung morning, a little empty
dust scuds under the table, must be spring
season of slammed plates, some great
para-aldehyde, like nature is an artificial
ester, or was the orange blossom
a gag of unrealized patrimony

if I was better practiced at forgetting
you wouldn’t be so displacingly apparent
I don’t even like the word I, I, I, the whey
of its cheese seepage, the whole remembrance

tulle and corelli work, a needle needed to
re-sew as spinal misalignments
for a some ripe plucked myth-historic figure
to extemporize, patch over plot
lack,

all time’s showing off, as if there was a greater
attention to seek, dog-nose like, how hard to
even write the word, sound, image; that seeks
me to attend to

a thousand phrases, the inapparent bliss

way out the back – when I look up
into the miasma of trees, in that giddiness
of leaves, there is everything of you



poem by Carol Jenkins
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