A Poem by Heather Elliot

Nostalgia

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

                                                                     -L. P. Hartley

Well I love to travel so

I’d shake pixels from my arms,

walk past the ice fishers’ shadowbox

huts on the wintered river.

I know the shape

of these armchair hills, valley palm wrapped

around the city lights.

Still, rewind the glacial shelf, let me

skirt its unfriendly coast. I’ll wash up

against my nostalgia long enough to ask

Australopithecus if she knew a word or sound

for pleasure, in sex or holding an infant or just

winding her fingers through pelts. If she ever

held a feather and stroked its silky threads.

I’d watch the crucifixion of a man

whose name history lost, for the same

reasons I walked Dachau’s iron gates

and pored postcards of lynchings; smiling woman

with the sun in her eyes. Man

in his good jacket and hat

pointing casually at what they’d done.

I’d die quickly, on a day

no one wrote about, my body too

soft, my opinions too strong.

I would judge the people

by my modern standards, lose

my historical idols

along the way. If someone painted me

or snapped a photograph, I’d look

hunted, mouth pursed like in the black

and white photographs

sprinkling Grandma’s house. Look

for me there, my shape pressed

near the frame, waving to the future.

Heather Elliott recently finished her MFA in poetry at Minnesota State University Mankato, and is currently teaching a little/writing a lot while she considers what’s next. Her work is informed by avid interest in travel (she was an English teacher in China for two years), current events, linguistics (she rationalizes her poor Chinese) and everyday life. She has been published by Terracotta Typewriter and Chamber Four Literary Magazine.