SNAPSHOTS 2

so little time  
            so many infinities

A PoetryEtc Project:
Week Five:
Wednesday May 28th

afternoon green wings
thinning
stretch to autumn
the fluff of air
phases golden leaf

and down in cool
comes shadow light
scratching branches
laid out beneath
mighty drifts of cumulus

Jill Jones, Sydney, 4.15pm

 

INSTAMATIC HAIKU

Wednesday again.
Where's that bleeding camera?
Smile. Click. See me. Here.

Robin Hamilton, Loughborough, 8.01 am

been through
been under
a cloud
a funeral
an old friend
but suddenly
this morning
the skies
seem to
clear.

patrick mcmanus,
raynes park, london, 8am

 

inside my computer
lives an entire opera

it has rows of trumpets
shining like the pen on my desk

and drums bigger than alaska
and hysterical flutes

and behind my screen
a man is singing

about war but I can't
understand a word he is saying

he is singing in italian
I thought modern

american operas were written
in english but mind you

even if they are in english
you can't ever hear the words

you don't have to

Alison Croggon, Melbourne, Australia, 6.14pm

 

Got cat new fabric mouse at Sainsburys this morning. Pink with black spots. Cat dont want to know. Cat sleeps upstairs. But got gravy Felix pouches. Big surprise. Will be new to cat for tea. Read New Scientist. Read newsgroups. Chapelle du Roi early music at St John's 1 o'clock. Festival. Picasso exhibition. Maybe time for lemonade in pub. Wash car this afternoon if dont rain. Then bath.. Italians in European Cup Final on TV tonight. Another day. And Barbara Ehrenreich, Polly Toynbee, Will Hutton to read for instruction.

Douglas Clark, Bath, UK, 10.40 am

 

knowledge of place

(or moving before the landlord sells the building)

in the space of one
week, worlds may shift, ideas take over
from suggestion, driving away, leaving
what was once believed
or lived as dust
as a matter of change
of address
cards and a scatter of mental
images
coming with
or going with us
to grafton avenue, but still
newark
stories we can no longer use
about the original paisley/silver/violet wallpaper
the purple shag rugs, the wake-wags,
the original neighbors
who never liked how we dressed, who save
their parking spaces in winter with kitchen chairs
the daily routine of planes that swoop low, set off car alarms
create snow on the television and nobody does anything
about it but talk and perform those random acts of
passive aggression as the adrenaline rushes
to flushed faces and taut skin, we read
the reminder that we are all renters here

Deborah L. Humphreys
Poor Souls Convent
(the corner of Barbara and Niagara Streets and
over the funeral home)
Newark, NJ
5:58 am

Snapshot II

Another another another
Day. The sun's rolled up, and soon it will
Roll down. It totals
Nothing. Sheep I can see
Seem curiously morbid (im-
Pending knowledge of the im-
Pending knives?). I must go out and buy
A cheer-
Ful dis-
Position.

Rob Stanton, Pickering, 8:15 am

 

one by one
the white petals fall
catch the light
glitter as they turn

apple & pear tree
stand white & full
some scattering slow

a day or two to go
shining occasional

when sun breaks through

Douglas Barbour, Edmonton, Canada, 07:15

 

NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

Rainy May.
The owner of the former World Trade Center
sues Cantor Fitzgerald for
a million bucks in unpaid rent,
period ending September 10, 2001.

The official line today is
Saddam destroyed the WMDs
before we got there.

(While we're on the subject
of incredibility,
on Saturday next, would you attend
my ordination as a Catholic priest--
they're letting me bring my
common-law wife with me.)

Rainy May.
A spring without spring, cold, damp.
I recall reading that the summer of 1345
was cold and damp, harvests failed,
and in distant China
an illness started that three years later
swept across the planet,
taking the just and unjust alike.

Ken Wolman, Sea Bright, NJ/USA, 8:07 AM

 

5 Snapshot Variations

Snope's hat

s naps hot

pants sho

s (nap) shot

snap shut

Halvard Johnson, NYC, 5/28/03 10:18 a.m. EDT

 

Summer might be coming nearer.
As we walk on hot pavements
I am taught how to perform
a four handed Mexican wave
by my daughter.

Now she is laughing, watching TV
soon she will be bent over a pile of paper
scouring for the knowledge
that must be present in her brain
when it is demanded of her
at nine oclock on Monday morning.

Neighbours is about a girl
paralysed from the waist,
swimming in a pink bikini.

Liz Kirby, Macclesfield UK, 5pm

 

At this hour, the city belongs to
commercial office cleaners,
people carrying boxes of eggs,
fresh milk daily,
white vans in a hurry,
blackbirds, and sunlight.

Peter Howard, outside King's College, Cambridge, UK 6:55am

Grey, overcast sky
the herring gull sentinels
sit on every lamp-post
observe their domain
wait to shit on those
who pass beneath

I can put the car through the carwash
again

Roger Collett, Seascale,
Cumbria 28/5/03 18.50BST

 

FILM, AKI K(aurismaki)

Final warning:
I want my money back
laugh. Once,
month ago,

afford to walk.
Know what they plan.
I'll tell you

know what I'd found.

Barry Alpert, Silver Spring,
MD, 7PM 5-27-03 – 1:49PM 5-28-03

 

Caustic soda breaking down the sludge
blocking our drain. Twee vomit - as of larks -
and yellow poo. Sent out for sanitary
towels, again. The body is a marvel,
adorned in its fatigues. Observe
this small change in the weather: one
extra pair of lungs, belting it out.

Dominic Fox, Leicester, UK 9.11pm

 

FIRST AVENUE IS WRAPPED IN SHINE

its macadam rainglazed. I slosh
inside, heft my package high
onto the counter. In the box,
an ornate frame marks
the only boundaries for a single red
bloom on canvas, my oil rendition
of what I had captured on film.

The hibiscus blazes a hot Cadmium
Red, with streaks of yellow,
foliage a lush Sap tinted
with varying degrees of white.

White.
Tabula rasa.

Can I erase and leave
only what was once so simple?
A baby embraced, wrapped
in shine. John Locke, didn't
you hypothesize, "Let us then
suppose the mind to be...

white
paper void
of all characters"?

The characters of your name
were neatly scribed on the butcher
paper skin of the package.
It's not too late to rip away that name,
the one that once was mine
leaving it void of all characters,
of your character.

The words on the card inside,
were they tinged with the pigment
of the bloody tears you force
from me each time we speak?

"Priority mail please," and I surrender
my burden to a postal clerk, realizing
the finality of what I had done.

Audrey Friedman

 

Family snaps in leatherette albums prove
'nothing lasts forever' (thanks Mum) as shadows
crawl on their stomachs, the sun
sinks in the West you never won. Looming
into the tedium waiters understand
the way nostrils understand incense, you
drop your glasses onto Carrara marble
polished by butcher's cheesecloth.

Bees boil your Siberian crab-apple as a bellbird
curtsies its branches. You yell
'Gidday' to the red dress next door: she
fumbles her keys. Her tongue is dry
like a thornbush after the nor'wester
and her glare invents the end.

David Howard

 

For John Tranter

here we are
serving as bridges for the strong
and the weak, simulating the camera's
flash of urgency
longing for florets of light to hit the brain
naming it as work, listening close-at-hand
for the explosion of words to kick in,
colour these somnolent walls.
too long in the game, says Reuf,
and we miss the lure and thrill
of all that burns

Helen Hagemann, WA, Australia

 

After a few minutes driving
through the mountain valleys
green with the rain and the blue
skies bright with their vanishing,
I turn into a wilder thing,
so coming home to the night
I left, with its absence
of moon, and its innumerable
crickets, all of these things
drowse in my body--4000 feet of
sand, four hours of sun,
a waterfall breaking coldly
into my face, the ancient
black stone upon which
it breaks, a slippage
on a muddy path, a
little boy that I
carried from hectoring
misery at the heat
of his mother's tongue
across the depths
that carried the older
children who gave themselves
to the current, laughing,
to be carried away,
and he stomps his
feet in the mud
with its slivers
of pulse, for what
is a stream that
moves not like
a stream, but
like the tide,
except whatever
it is that surges
through the cells,
all that ebb and
flow of my love
for you, as quick
and as quiet
as the silver and
black striped tilapia
that dart and school
in the spring
that emerges warmly
from the earth,
so that all the things
I've lived and lived
quietly, fold
up into night
my shoulders
full of wings

Rebecca Seiferle, Farmington, New Mexico, 11:28 am

 

Three at picnic
table stir a vat
of apricot &
melon syllables--
crumb. after. juice.
table. sparrow. wing.

Mockingbirds slant back
& forth testing
their abacus parti
wrap, stick & string:
fluency takes forever

Chris Murray, Dallas,
Texas, 2:13 a.m.

 

I have felled the grass
on the lawn. Proudly
reviewing the slaughter
I realize something
nasty has hit my heel.
It's itching like hell.

Árni Ibsen, Hafnarfjördur,
Iceland, 09:45