Elisa Carlson was born and raised in the high desert of Northern Nevada. A contemplative, her writing has appeared in Lunch Ticket, Trumpeter, Sierra Nevada Review, Argentum, Carte Blanche, Anti-Heroin Chic and elsewhere, Elisa is the author of Cormorant (Unsolicited Press 2023). She is an award-winning poet whose work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry film, The Basin, was selected for the 2025 Nature & Culture International Poetry Film Festival in Denmark. Elisa is the founder of Rabbitbrush.org - a literary journal for outsiders. Check it out.
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► Elisa Carlson's microchap & (selected) poems are available below. Download the PDF by clicking the title.
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Origami Microchap with Selected Poems |
| Elephantine |
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Click title to download microchap
Cover by
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I.
emigrants traveling through Nevada
during the 1840s, saw Elephants
in the desert, on bone white alkali
Elephants…when they were dying of thirst
in the perilous dust / but it wasn’t true
it was a matter of speech then common
in America: To See an Elephant was to say
you’d been through hell and lived to talk
II.
nearly two hundred years later,
after the last of the American elephants
went extinct in the high desert
there are no more words for endurance
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III.
just a muddy river in the desert
where Elephants used to appear
IV.
its banks bloom in aluminum
and somewhere down the line
two people are fighting about
how much they loved each other
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Elisa Carlson © 2026
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