Jenny Clay has had poetry published in Takahe, Tongue in Your Ear, Live Lines, New Zealand Poetry Society anthologies, and in Blackmail Press and Southern Ocean Review. A year spent on a Whitireia writing course helped her writing to become more exploratory. In 2009 she was awarded a mentorship by the NZ Society of Authors to develop her biography of a nineteenth century collector, significant in Auckland’s development. She is interested in layers of history and in art forms interacting. In 2011 she entered the challenge of "Metonymy" to produce a collaborative piece with an artist within two months. Their joint work was selected for the exhibition at Corban Estate Arts Centre, an artwork of six photographs and poems around the theme of ‘Paper, Scissors and Stone’.
Staying Within Boundaries
I toot a duck
on a pedestrian crossing
by the intermediate school
he waddles slowly
over the lines,
does not go
into a flap.
At the dentist
my mouth
full of injections
the nerve below
my right eye
goes numb
and the poster
a Grahame Sydney landscape
on the ceiling swims
above
thick glasses
protecting from flying filing
and tooth.
I try to be still,
grind my teeth only
when I’m told to.
The Capture
From inside
camera obscura
sensitized metal plate
exposed with
vapour of mercury
holographic image
daguerreotypes
bright light
staring eyes
pose held
perfectly still
carte de viste
pocket postcard
albumen prints
beat fresh eggs
to a froth
and coat onto glass
wet collodion plates
glassy negatives
expose before dry
darkroom chemicals
adding spirits
altered images
album pages
of black and white photos
change into colour
as they draw closer
a ten year old girl
takes a photo
of her sister’s kapa haka
on her cellphone
sends it up north
simultaneously
via satellite.
Previously published in Live Lines Volume III
Past and Present
The man of the couple
in the queue to leave
Cockatoo Island
said, ‘We’re from Hamilton,
but we’ve lived in Parramatta
for eighteen months.’
Two Australians were
between us.
The man talked of
how New Zealand
is moving towards Australia
by centimetres
a centimetre a year
the continental drift
how after an earthquake
it moved about 30 centimetres
closer.
The man from Hamilton
who lives in Parramatta said,
‘We can’t let all
the boat people in,
must put them somewhere.’
Cockatoo Island was a convict prison
later an industrial site
hosts the Sydney Biennale
in the twenty-first century
experimental art
sharing space
with aged wood
and corrugated buildings.
In the old overseers house
a film of a woman
using her body’s performance
as a voice
being drowned
in a drum of water
her face pushed in
pulled out
pushed in
pulled out
by a large muscled man
again and again
she splutters for breath
I felt complicit
in the waterboarding
left the others
watching
Scissors and Stone one of a series of six poems for Metonymy 2011
excavating
forgotten tombs
old faults
buried fossils
sediment slips
from cliff-face
a girl floating
watches rock
fall
below
a woman walks
her dogs
water dripping
to stone
the throbbing sound
solidifies in
stalagmites
stalactites
excavating
peel back
layers
with the sharp end
scraping
until the blade
blunts
on bedrock.
Intersecting Roads
The sign says
WAY
GIVE
where the way
is larger
upside
down
when the road seal
stops abruptly
by broken lines
you ask me
where we’re
travelling to
let’s crawl
through the dry stalks
on our bellies I say
pull out all
the fence posts
and wind them
into a bundle
if you’ll be
the WAY
I’ll be
the GIVE
