Discussing Elephant Puppets the Night of the Refugee Ban
       

Elephant puppets so big ten men can fit under their pipe bodies
and manipulate four fat limbs and a trunk: gray veils mimicking a
pachydermic funeral

and lapis lazuli eyes, big as a bruise on a thigh.

We talk about them over an olive sampler at Mia Casa—
little bistro tucked into the clapboard block between a bar and a bar—

cobblestones, leaded windows, paned—

there's that uncanny dip, that sweet valley of something that looks
like something else: deep eyes, big as the loaf on the plate, big as a hole

in the middle of a nation.

This is not my house.
We talk about the mammoth elephant puppets,

how they seem to dance but it's men
running under the articulated pipes and the sheer veils.

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Copyright © 2018 Jennifer Martelli All rights reserved
from My Tarantella
Bordighera Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission