Dr. Hurley’s Digest, Vol. II, Issue 35

Three new Snake-Oilers graced our (web)pages this week with some Smithsonian goodness, as well as poetry and photography. Catch up below!

Monday – Smithsonian

Wednesday – Photography

Friday – Poetry

We have a new series starting this week, so stay tuned for more info on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Potatoes

1. The Wheat Fields

The cows chew the pasture grass,
and potatoes grow in infertile soil.
The bags of wheat are taken away.

Dubliners forced to hoe the fields,
to have a place to stay,
so cows can chew the pasture grass.

The potatoes are rotting. Government
silent. Crops fail. Still
bags of wheat are taken away.

Children smile with sore mouths,
bleeding, toothless scurvy red,
but cows can chew the pasture grass.

Cornmeal for the workers,
Emigration for the lucky,
bags of wheat taken away…

A future of the sea, flu –
New World come true,
while the cows chew the pasture grass,
and the bags of wheat are taken away.

2. The Palace

They don’t care much for potatoes,
sitting up in British Parliament.
Care more for bills, tariffs, raising taxes,
and keeping foreign wheat out.
Irish, what Irish? Workhouses
will teach them not to starve.

On the rocking ships, they starve
making a new life away from potatoes.
Won’t keep them from workhouses
or disagreeing with parliament

or a depression they don’t know about,
a waste of life worrying about taxes.

Tony Blair apologizes

for taxes,
the 1840s, those that starved,
‘the richest and most powerful nation,’
and his tongue is heavy with potatoes,
and his tongue is from Parliament,
and his tongue is in a workhouse.

Rows of potatoes sit in Parliament,
putting taxes in, taking taxes out,
forgetting about workhouses

and the people that starve.

* * * * *

Jess Taylor is the founder of The Emerging Writers Reading Series (http://ewreading.wordpress.com). She is also a fiction and non-fiction writer, a poet, an artist, and a musician. After growing up in the remote and often forgotten town of Palgrave, Ontario, she has moved to Toronto, Ontario. She is currently attending the University of Toronto for their English in the Field of Creative Writing MA Program. To read, watch, and see more of Jess Taylor, check out www.jesstaywriter.com.

Her contributions to Snake-Oil Cure can be found here.

Dr. Hurley’s Digest, Vol. II, Issue 31

Relive some great poetry and photography from this week’s Snake-Oil Cure, and stay tuned next week, when we have even more new contributors.

Monday – Poetry

Kant’s Universal History by Jess Taylor

Friday – Photography

Exposure № 096: Rituals of the Lost Faith by Katerinna Ivanovic

 

Kant’s Universal History

I come now to that part of my theory which gives its greatest charm, by the sublime idea
which it presents of the plan of the creation.
– Immanuel Kant, Universal Natural History and the Theory of the Heavens

This Earth slows for me, or it slows altogether.
And they hand me a prize from Berlin.
Sat in a gold adorned room, crossed the courtyard
passed the fountain, should be proud –

but the retardation of the Earth, it’s merely the Earth doing this.
Some unseen force of God.
Not me.

Just like this Milky Way that I am staring at tonight
through my telescope. Once these astronomers thought
these spots of light filled all the heavens
and the heaven of heavens without order and
without intention. But here
through this telescope
I can see.

Through this eye,
my camera obscura.

It must be our brains.
These marvellous brains
that have constructed
space and time.

But I cannot explain these processes.
How this data arranges.
Gives order to the chaos.

I Cant.

(The name
I
changed
and hid).

And so begins

my silent decade.

* * * * *

Jess Taylor is the founder of The Emerging Writers Reading Series (http://ewreading.wordpress.com). She is also a fiction and non-fiction writer, a poet, an artist, and a musician. After growing up in the remote and often forgotten town of Palgrave, Ontario, she has moved to Toronto, Ontario. She is currently attending the University of Toronto for their English in the Field of Creative Writing MA Program. To read, watch, and see more of Jess Taylor, check out www.jesstaywriter.com.

This is her first contribution to Snake-Oil Cure.