On Targa, Middleton Street, Byron Bay

Oh my, why did I start sketching the back of the bar with all its fiddly bottles and glasses? Mostly I try for something hasty, there is only so much one's fellow dinners will put up with. Still, there are plenty of reasons for loitering in Targa's dark wood clubbiness - most of them on plates. Firstly, the roast peppers with white anchovies, one of which I purloined from Mr S., rustic red and yellow draped around a tomatoey thing (the peppers not Mr S), with oodles of fresh flavour. For this I had to hand over a large grilled prawn and some sopresso, grilled with rosemary, that I would have preferred to keep to myself.

The salmon was excellent, just pinker in the middle with the crispy skin effect which confounds me. Why is this so good and why do I always leave the skin at home? As I still hadn't finished all those bottles, I had to order tiramisu for dessert. Despite my intention to leave some before I knew it, it was gone. If I lived in Byron Bay I might have to attempt to draw the '60's airport scene dot-matrixed on the ceiling.

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.

Show Me The Treasure

On Targa, Middleton Street, Byron Bay

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