brett dionysius

MANUELA THE RED FOOTED TORTOISE

It was a long form of isolation in the hole; one a human might endure
if their rebellious last name was Mandela; but mine was Manuela,
red-footed tortoise, ex-family pet.
It’s moot how I fell into the box in the first place, hard
to remember his last touchdown of my leathery football.
A man’s wallet that falls down a couch’s crevasse to live
in darkness amongst bobby-pins, hair-ties & dust; the
comfortable underworld of the vanished. I ghosted them
for thirty years, the red warning lights of my legs glowing
mercurial in the lightless cube, like a buoy’s warning from
the mid-Atlantic. The disappeared can come back. Proof
that hope is a thing with scales too & condensation, even
termites that came to gnaw my Plato’s Cave. Like an eyelid
my shell opened & light burnt away my shapeless mass.

B. R. Dionysius was founding Director of the Queensland Poetry Festival. He has published four collections of poetry, two chapbooks, an artist’s book and a verse novel. His ninth collection, 'Critical State’ was published in September 2022. He was short-listed in the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize, teaches English & Literature, lives in Brisbane and in his spare time watches birds.