Carol Jenkins
Carol Jenkins is a visual artist, writer and publisher living in Sydney, Australia, you can find bits of her work online on her blog Show Me The Treasure. Her first book of poetry Fishing in the Devonian was published in 2008 by Puncher & Wattmann. Her publishing company River Road Press produces audio CDs of Australian poetry.
Mulberries
(written on the occasion of seeing dried white mulberries in Shaza’s Persian Groceries.)
Somewhere I am in a mulberry tree,
tucked into the green skirt that nearly drapes
the ground. I am wearing blue shorts
and a white top, a two-piece set made
of terry-towelling, and on the top, appliquéd,
are green leaves and under this calyx suspended,
free, are terry towelling strawberries, that are delicious
but inedible and then, to one side, and then another
splatters of dark mulberry juice, indelible.
Spice Trade
Your amalgam, a pestling of hard seeds
and dry leaf, has vanilla moments
not plain but sweet, tempered down with constant
coriandering, enlivened with words of sumac,
heat of chili on the tongue, the sharp
and pungent turns galangal-ish,
and your barberry tang that raises shiver
from the well below my solar plexus,
shakes up taste buds on my torso, before it sinks
into my sub-continent of spice.
I offer back a citric acid discipline,
the honey bee’s diasporas, mycelia of salty plums
that spring backwards from the tongue
what you never thought to think, as day dissolves,
about the ragged illegalities of juniper
or might you ask, before all the aromatics
do some limbo in ras el hanout, about the rosehips?