PAULA PARRIS EISENSTEIN
The Rusty Toque | Issue 10 | Poetry | June 30, 2016
Excerpt from Lae
This suite of poems is part of a larger manuscript based on the purported last diary entries of Amelia Earhart.
viiWorked intently
these past two days repacking plane, eliminating unessential personal goods, for example Fred’s small tin case bought in Africa I notice still rattles so can’t be packed very full viiiRestlessness and
disappointment from not getting off ground this morning FN and I commandeer a truck, ford a small river torrential after tropic rain, drive through grass taller than the vehicle, visit a village with huts built atop stilts where natives train pigs for watchdogs ixOn some huts are
carvings around the eaves, grotesque coloured animals especially crocodiles. I see women for almost the first time One bends over a small black cook vessel from which protrude two immense cabbages. My pidgin English dictionary doubtless worth the two shilling expense I learn from it native women are all called Mary x
The natives have
their own words for everything. For instance large airplanes are called “birds” while small ones merit only “insect.” Because the surface of my Lockheed is even, not corrugated resembling the tins certain biscuits are shipped in from England, it is called the biscuit box xiSusceptible
to earthquakes, we are told much of New Guinea is silt held together by entangled undergrowth. At the rivers’ edges pieces of land break off, float out hundreds of miles to sea before they disintegrate. Little islands you sometimes see animals trapped on |
PAULA PARRIS EISENSTEIN is the author of the novel Flip Turn from Mansfield Press. Her prose and poetry has appeared in the literary magazines The Puritan, filling Station and Descant, in the anthology The White Collar Book and as a broadside through Toronto Poetry Vendors.
