Hedge Fun

Checks are the go-to pattern for upmarket hedges this year, here we see a pair cosy in a diagonal drape, showing a bit of leave, but still nothing beats chilly nights sleeping out than a warm wool blanket.

Mexico Folklorico - a Costumeria in Oaxaca

 Oaxaca, or at least for the four days I spent there, seemed a dreamy parade of folkloric costume, no doubt the Spring Festival bought out these group assemblages of colour and embroidery, but I like to think the place is always like this.  I have a dim memory of going to the Showground in Randwick when I was five or six, and seeing something called Mexico Folklorico, and the place was packed with people eager to get a glimpse of another culture, a bring-it-to-you  practice that was a substitute for actual travel.

Toil, Toil, Boil Bubble - Submit to Cordite!

The go to address for all hard working poets this month is Cordite, I will be the Guest Editor ( yes, with that Fancy Uppercase) for the Toil issue.  And here I am,  just to show you how committed I am to  blood (okay it's cochineal), sweat ( midday in Oaxaca late April it's compulsory) and tears ( maybe later, no point in being melodramatic). So, see you soon!
  http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/jenkins-toil/
 The Kind of Poems for Toil:
I’m looking to meet the lone toiler, the staff, whole professions, whole guilds.
What I want for TOIL are energetic and intelligent takes and insight into people at work, singularly and collectively; the jokes of the mathematician; the travails of plumbers; trade secrets and tricks; the mastery of crafts; the dance of deduction for detectives in all forms and the plied threading of making.
I’m looking for toil in its broadest sense, the quotidian tasks both paid and unpaid. I’m looking for poems that explore the fabric of working via wit and lucidity, and please consider yourself invited to make the most of that diphthong in toil, and whatever it rhymes with.
As to form, be my guest as to what that is. Set out hop-scotches of ideas that skip to it, send scintillating sestinas, quatrains, haiku, sonnets or be that agent of free-verse. I’d like to see landays and crazy coherencies of rhyme and rhetoric.
Work can be microscopic up to panoramic. Put that work toad to use.

Bicycle Business Models -Cuba and Mexico

While in the West the bicycle's lycra-ised  peleton  is the new golf, in Mexcio and Cuba it is the prevailing substrate of the micro business, the workaday work horse, the vendor's aid and conveyer of piles of pineapples, plaits of onions, mounds of mangoes,  pecks of peppers,  swathes of sweet treats and loads of loaves.