A Short Walk in the Old Market Hanoi

Moulded sticky red rice, the colour comes from a cooking the rice with a variety of red 'pumpkin' shown below.

The curcubit culprit in question (see above).

Bamboo shoots, cut various ways, salted, and slightly fermented, so close to the pavement they might be growing out of it

Fine vermicelli style rice noodles, these were so fresh they were still warm.

Very good looking pork, later in the morning I cooked some of this, mincing it for fried rice paper rolls.

Fresh tofu, a second later half of these were sold.

Beautifully shape and bound chrysanthemum leaves, like a metaphor for a tragic love story.

Kohlrabi, later this was diced finely as part of the filling for the rice paper rolls.

A dish of fresh pipis.

Gloriously marbled quail eggs,


The explanation that these were Clam worms, still mystifies, not just as to how they might be cooked but also as to why would something with legs ( look closely) be called a worm.

The pieces of fish in the dish had been marinated in fresh turmeric.

Two kinds of eggs, these fermented ones rolled in sawdust and straw.

This variety of spinach looked like it could used a salad leaf.

Curiosity Cabinet

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

A Short Walk in the Old Market Hanoi

CONVERSATION