The Elephant's Nostalgia
By Lindsay Tuggle
Published 25 October 2021
This is the door.
Our curved bodies grew behind
these spiral walls.
Crescent mouths of living time
her stitches keep their words.
They've closed in sky.
Bands of signatures float in
oblong circles on her
bare arms.
Liars glow in the dark.
I never lit a match
until
our house began to smell
of kindling
dust and
an abundance of leftovers.
The ashes of our floral sea.
She was lost in autumn and still
recalls the sensation of being found.
Decades later
a circus in sepia
blankness on the underside
of a mirror.
Visitors to the lunar
caravan park must wait
here.
It's just that they were staring at her.
Escape involves fate and a tiger;
a tightrope is
the elephant's nostalgia.
Past aztec statues
open doors and too many stairs.
The end of
the end was
the best place to begin.
As part of Red Room Poetry's 2010 The Cabinet of Lost and Found project, students at Brisbane Water Secondary College (NSW) participated in three morning poetry workshops in a single week, which allowed them to intensively explore their ideas. The final project was displayed at the end of the term to the rest of the school.