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Today's poem is by Jennifer Martelli

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.



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

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