Tenakee Inlet Poetry Slam 2006

OK I'm back. More later.

Summary: We changed our route due to forecasts of 35 knot winds and 13 foot seas. The 8 foot seas made me throw up in my mouth repeatedly so I'm glad we didn't venture into the ones that were a few feet higher. We instead did a neat little loop through Peril Strait and Chatham Strait and ended up in a wacky little town called Tenakee Springs, where we met some seiners (some sweet, some demented), some hippies (some laid-back, some surprisingly uptight), and some very cool feisty retired folks who gave us coffee and homemade salmonberry jam and a bounty of fresh delicious things from their garden and who I now love (hi Leba and Roger!). We also ate monstrously huge Dungeness crabs dipped in garlic butter.

There were also whales, but that whole subject deserves its own post.

Instead, since I've just mentioned garlic butter, I give you one of my entries to the Tenakee Inlet Poetry Slam 2006, held August 6. Participants: Janna, my sister, me, and "Schencky". To give you a tiny bit more context, this was after we all started sipping bourbon at about 11 AM, just after breakfast, and we'd been watching humpbacks feeding all morning in front of us. (It was a day off paddling, and just before we paddled into the actual town of Tenakee Springs.) Someone would say a word, and we'd all have to write a poem about it.

GARLIC
Vampires beware!
I have a necklace of the finest
toes of garlic
dancing at my throat
tapping a rhythm
while blood surges past
under the thin fine skin
from my heart to my mouth.

I ate it raw too
let the delicate burn of it
on my tongue
and if you breathe near my skin
you will smell it.

When I sleep tonight
I will dream of you at the window:
ravenous,
intent,
unable to enter.

My mouth
like a sour kiss;

your mouth
like a slashed heart.