Carol Jenkins
Smittening
You should see I am so smitten
with narrative, if I watch an ant
walking, I start a story for each
of its six feet.
I know this, in part from the syntax of
small lizards, clicking over
by magnets plotted in the ground
and by opening
the tale of the shirt,
the white one with black markings
a quiet shirt, if I could stand
next to it for a while
I could stop making up shirt stories.
Or that’s what I say
but text is fiction toiling
to be fact.
Carol Jenkins lives in Sydney and is actively neglecting a worthy career in chemical regulation to write anything she feels like. Last year she started to send things out and has had poems published in journals including Heat, Overland and Island. ‘Smittening’ is from a story sequence of poems called Shirt/Post Shirt. The white shirt with the black markings is still her favourite.