Lindsay Tuggle
Lindsay Tuggle is the author of The Afterlives of Specimens (2017), which was glowingly reviewed as a cover feature in The New York Review of Books, American Literature (Duke UP) and American Literary History (Oxford UP). Her debut poetry collection, Calenture (2018), was one of The Australian’s Books of the Year, shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s Mary Gilmore Award and Australian Poetry’s Anne Elder Award. Her work has been supported by numerous international grants, including the prestigious Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress, and a Travelling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2023, Lindsay was a Writer-in-Residence at Château d’Orquevaux in France and Bundanon Trust in the Shoalhaven of Australia.
Read more at http://www.lindsaytuggle.com
The Arsonists’ Hymnal
Our story starts in the field
and ends in the bath
or vice versa.
I can no longer remember when things came full circle,
when our endings and beginnings began
to eat their own tales.
In the middle, there is fire.
Summer was not yet the vast,
burning thing it has become.
Arson is a form of prophecy.
Flames have tongues, and so do we—
whether we use them or not.
The fires were warning us,
all this time.
No one believes a prophet,
until it’s too late.
That night, we lay on the grass,
watching for heat lightening.
We cannot sleep without seeing
that jagged rupture in the sky,
a tangle of stars and satellites
discernible only by blinking proximity.
After the lightening
our adolescent
poison quickens, then recedes.
After, we sleep.
But not tonight.
Tonight, we speak again in our mother tongue,
a dual fluency we alone share.
At first, we don’t hear the shift.
Slippage is like that, both sudden and gradual.
They forced it from us long ago
or so it seemed.
We remember the doctors’ creeping hands
encircling our throats,
probing the wet insides of our mouths.
A needle. A parade of arms.
Slowly, we learned to speak
the Queen’s tongue.
We forgot to remember
the poem unfurling
in the air between my sister and I,
the slow dance of our exhalations.
Then,
at thirteen,
a murmuration escaped.
Our bodies begin
to stretch and swell.
Our marrow aches.
We are always hungry.
Games over who can eat more, or less,
then dance til exhaustion.
Our limbs crave sleep,
but are too long for our narrow beds.
So we lay in the field,
waiting for the heat to break into light.
We didn’t set the fire.
Not with our hands.
We dreamed of burning for so long,
at last the lightening answered our call.
We lay still as the grass flumed ever closer,
let the dying embers kiss our skin.
In our secret tongue, we agreed
to remain, unmoving,
to let the ending write itself.
Did we wake in the bath
or the grave?
I can no longer recall
which of us resides underground.
Oracles and fire-eaters share fatal tendencies.
It is a dangerous business, prophecy.
Paralysis is innate, in the face of extinction.
Fawn response on a global scale.
When ashes fall from your mouth,
remember, you asked for this.
Swallow hard, sister.
One last time.