Portside

Elephants

By Amy Miller

America, remember how you trained them

for the crowd, jumbo hides and bellies

teetering on stools, soft and moving

tips of trunks fingering a coin,

a tail.

Something large and Barnum

paints the darkened posters in our hearts.

We eat peanuts while someone tells us

we’re the greatest. Elephants

and donkeys and a lady

on one leg,

one wheel inside another

and another, all backward

and distracting, glitter

you can see from space (but

up close, glue and sweat

and welts),

elephants and tigers—

a metal ark that lumbers

through your town. Doors grind open.

Here’s your freedom on a chain.

Amy Miller’s writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Nimrod, Rattle, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her full-length poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press and will be published in 2018, and her chapbooks include I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press) and Rough House (White Knuckle Press). She lives in Oregon and blogs at writers-island.blogspot.com.