Poetry:
    A Compendium of Eyes
    Woman to Man:  for Helene Cixous & Luce Irigary
    Poem for a Hangover

Jayne Fenton Keane
Post-graduate student
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
E-mail: jfk@poetinresidence.com

A Compendium of Eyes

..And eyes big love-crumbs (e.e.cummings)

i like your small bones and thighs of glass
cases. Such intricate woven strands of light.
Fibres brighter and glaze warm.
i like your small fingers. i like their flare,
i like their smooth. i like to watch their sparks
on my body and its bones, and the sparkling
- pat tter (ns) which snap
along nerve after nerve
sharp, i like feeling the dark and light of you,
i like, slowly stroking the sudden edge
of your cool (ed) molten skin, and the this-goes-here
command of your flesh..

and possibly I like the cast

look of you dappling over me

© Jayne Fenton Keane

 

Woman to Man:  for Helene Cixous & Luce Irigary

Woman in Binary Heels

are you sitting (passive) standing (active)
are you in shadow or light
are you organic or processed
am or pm
do you have a vagina or penis
are you ruled by your heart or your head
do you make sense or does sense make you
is your name pathology or logo(s)
do you rupture, split, spill, generate
or do you plant, stake, conquer, rein
are you really that simple to define, woman
are you really that simple to be defined against man
I have sewn the ambiguity to the query
are you AM or PM and what does that mean?

© Jayne Fenton Keane

 

Poem for a Hangover

A hydroid wakes.
Cells visit cells
and hold parties
while you sleep.

At the end of the night
you wake, wondering
who kidnapped your body
while you were sleeping

There's a shark rising in your thoughts.
Your tongue evolves into
some kind of amphibian
on the verge of extinction.

Your dreams were full of reptiles.
Spent the night shedding skin
snapping splints out of wishes
and running on the spot for antivenom.

Pretty in paralytic sleep.
Your lips are like wrinkled fingertips
that have been in the bath too long
and your eyes are two frightened pufferfish

pricking in the dark
prickling through high kicks
holding their breath
peering out from under the sheets.

© Jayne Fenton Keane

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

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