Lindsay Tuggle

Lindsay Tuggle is a doctoral student at The University of Sydney, working on post /modern American poetry. She is interested, both creatively and academically, in exploring the ways in which the process of mourning intersects with the land one inhabits, how mourning is both borderless and inherent, and how this conception of grief can affect the ways we write and read bereavement. Her poetry has been published in HEAT , and she has published academic works on the poets Walt Whitman and Claude McKay.

Calenture

further:

past fuel silos and stilted houses

the median now feverish halting

air retains a diesel shimmer.

her thirst is verdant, cerebral

a calling

toward the language of uprooting

a rural tongue

cut through mouthfuls of gravel

slow hints at immersion

beyond the line’s end.

off season we are

maritime slum

boarders: interior

girls wander absently

in shift dresses down

fallen stairwells

in a house with no doors.

outside the low road beckons.

pockets of decay

tinge border towns

sulphureous, balmy.

once more white lines

are revelations.

abandonment as a plaything

rustles toothless in the tall grass

adjacent vacant lots.

disembarking she walks in blindfolds

remembering the curvature of floor pedals

the blurred resonance of bitumen tributaries.

drowning ends in a glassy sprawl.

roadside altars whisper

fire soars

home again

all the empty passageways entreat:

go sleep with dust.