Lucia Perillo
Inseminating the Elephant
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Inseminating the Elephant
Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out.
Chekhov
For Hayden Carruth (1921–2008) for cheering me on.
And for James Rudy for picking me up.
Virtue Is the Best Helmet
One of these days I’m going to get myself an avatar
so I can ride an archaeopteryx in cyberspace—
goodbye, the meat cage.
Pray the server doesn’t crash, pray
against the curse of carpal tunnel syndrome.
But then my friend the lactation consultant
brings up the quadriplegic who gave birth
(two times no less)
(motorcycle wreck)
just to make her body do
one thing the meat could still remember.
Somebody has to position the babies
to sip the breastmilk rivulets.
And the cells exude
despite their slumber. One minute
too much silence, the next there’s so much screaming.
Turns out Madagascar’s giant cockroach
makes a good addition to a robot
because the living brain adds up to more than: motor,
tracking ball, and the binary numeric code.
Usually the cockroach flees from light,
but sometimes it stands in its little coach unmoving,
stymied by the dumb fact of air.
And sometimes it rams into a wall
to force the world to show its hand.
Found Object
Somebody left this white T-shirt
like a hangman’s hood on the new parking meter—
the magic marks upon its back say: I QUIT METH 4-EVER.
A declaration to the sky, whose angels all wear seagull wings
swooping over this street with its torn scratch tickets
and Big Gulp cups dropped by the curb.
Extra large, it has been customized
with a pocketknife or a canine tooth
to rough the armholes where my boobs wobble out
as I roam these rooms lit by twilight’s bulb,
feeling half like Bette Davis in a wheelchair
and half like that Hells Angels kingpin with the tracheotomy.
Dear reader, do you know that guy?
I didn’t think so. If only we could all watch the same tv.
But no doubt you have seen the gulls flying,
and also the sinister bulked-up crows
carrying white clouds of hotdog buns in their beaks:
you can promise them you’ll straighten up, but they are such big cynics.
I should have told you My lotto #’s 2-11-19-23-36
is what’s written in front, beside the silk screen
for Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks™—
which means you can’t hijack my name;
no, you have to go find your own, like a Hopi brave.
You might have to sit in a sweat lodge until you pass out
or eat a weird vine and it will not be pleasant. Your pulse
goes staccato like a Teletype machine — then blam
you’ll be transformed into your post-larval being.
Maybe swallowtail, maybe moth: trust me, I know
because once I was a baby blue convertible
but now I’m this black hot rod painted with flames.
Rebuttal
My quarrel with the Old Masters is: they never made suffering big enough—
that tiny leg sliding into the bay almost insults me,
that it should be all we get of the falling boy after the half-hour stunt
of his famous flying. Don’t you see
they are cartoons? the drunk hissed
in the British Museum, a drunk in a sport coat
that made him look credible at first, some kind of docent,
an itinerant purveyor of glosses that left me
confused. I studied Brueghel’s paintings, tiny
skaters, and hunters come home with tiny dead animals
gutted outside the frame, where the tiny offal
presumably had been left. I was looking for Icarus
but the Musée des Beaux-Arts is in Belgium you twit
and so I did not see the plowman wearing his inexplicably
dainty shoes, a cartoon you American sow,
and no one came to my rescue in that gallery vacated
even by its dust. Where I also did not see the galleon
anchored below the plowman’s pasture with its oblivious,
content-with-being-tiny sheep. But just wait
until that ship sails out
and encounters the kind of storm that’ll require Abstract
Expressionism to capture the full feeling of.
The giant canvases of the twentieth century!
Swaths of color with no figures in them at all!
How immense the drowning when you’re the boy who drowns.
Between the fireball on your back and the water in front
all gray and everywhere and hard as concrete when you smack down.
“Dona”
Many of the Girl Scout songs
extorted a smile, our servile mugging—
but this one we loved best.
Starring a calf being hauled in a minor key,
its refrain two mournful syllables: dona.
First came the long o—an induction/seduction
to join the animal’s cargo cult, then came
the short a, when the calf turned to beef
with no last meal and no reprieve.
The gist of the lyric: that we could choose
to be the calf in the cart or a bird in the sky;
the idea was simple, but also a lie: dona.
Bird is small and can fly where it wants
but it’ll never be Miss Teen USA,
whereas the word abattoir was a chic French kiss
our tongues would enter willingly.
Let that bird flitter off
like a dry dead leaf: this was a hymn
that we sang on our knees
on the dais by the flag, dressed in our sashes
and green berets like irregulars planning
a suicide mission: there was glory ahead
when we signed on, clambered into the wagon,
and let the future hitch up its horse.
A Romance
I saw a child set down her
binder like a wall
through the candy bin at the Corner Luncheonette
so she could scoop out gum while she spoke to the clerk—
and from that moment was in love: Oh theft.
College was supposed to straighten me
like a bent tree strangled by a wire,
but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat.
How the red muscle gleamed in its shiny wrap,
a wedge that had once been the thigh or the loin
of a slow brute’s body, sugar-dirt and clotted grass
to be snatched in an instant
and zipped into the crone-y-est of pocketbooks.
Radiance housed in rawhide again, as when it was living.
A steak can be stuck in your jeans when you’re skinny,
a rump roast is right for a puffy down coat,
small chops will fit under a thin peasant blouse
where it falls off the breasts
like a woodland river
with a limestone amphitheater underneath.
Ancient city, ancient sublet, ancient wooden fire escape—
with my other bandits I learned to say how-de-do in French.
We were yanking on the cord that would start the motor of our lives
though we did not have the choke adjusted yet.
Sometimes it seemed I floated in the dregs like a tea bag
bloating up with facts.
Until a girl ran in the door, panting hard, face red,
slab thudding
from her snowflake-damasked waist onto the table,
and we stood around it gawking at the way it seemed to breathe.
Notes from My Apprenticeship
COMPARATIVE MORPHOLOGY OF THE VERTEBRATES
Knowledge shipped north in white plastic buckets.
To pry the lid off was to open a tomb.
We began with the shark
and worked our way up through the frog and the dove—
each month we groped the swamp like fugitives
to raise the next ghoul on the syllabus.
With a bright blade I sliced through the pelt’s wet mess,
exposing the viscera inside, tinted with latex
— blue for the veins, yellow for lymph—
it made me feel childish to see how far
somebody thought I needed the body to be
dumbed down. Outside was dumbed down
by late day’s half-dark, as snowflakes dropped into
Lac Saint-Louis, paddled in silence by great northern pike,
their insides mangled by old hooks.
No place in them conformed to its
depiction in the charts, but the first lesson
was sameness: from the frog in one bucket
to the frog in the next—
no surprises ahead in the formaldehyde of my life:
obedient fugitive,
go on,
roll up your sleeve,
plunge your arm in.
WHITE RAT
Etherized in a bell jar, they resembled tiny sandbags, stacked
We carried each by its tail, their feet like newborn grappling hooks
Their insides had vaginal qualities, pink and wet and gleaming
The tissue hummed
My scalpel got jittery
I sewed up my rat as soon as I could
Because I realized the spiderwebstuff holding us here is thin
It was in fact difficult to account for all the people walking around not dead
I don’t think I ever cut the gland I was supposed to, out
In the coming weeks, in lab-light, I made up little prayers-slash-songs
Like: Please white rat
Let me not have damaged you
You to whom I will be shackled all my years
You out of all your million brethren
If not genetically identical, then close
My rat went back to its Tupperware basin
With the cedar chips and the drinking bottle
That went chingle chingle whenever water was sipped
Which reassured me, knowing my rat was staying well hydrated
Though most of them languished
Which was, after all, their purpose
Though my rat stayed fat
Suggesting I’d botched the job of excising its adrenal
Not that its fatness saved it in the end
When all the living ones were gassed
Because the Christmas break had nearly come
Because of the deadline for the postmortem dissection
And time for the final roundup of facts
Oh rat
As you snuffle through your next incarnation
Say as my albino postman
Or my Japanese neurologist who taps her mallet on my knee
While I try not to visualize myself with your pink eyes and flaky scalp
Your scabrous tail especially
Because I have killed plenty of other things
But none of them have claimed me the way you did
THE TURTLE’S HEART
When we arrived, each belly-shell had a hole
whose clean edge signified that a power tool had been used
by the glamorous lab assistant
still wearing her goggles,
her long hair puffed up by the grimy rubber strap.
When I looked down, there was the heart
bumping in the hole,
and when I looked sideways
my braid dipped in like a paintbrush.
Summers I spent in a WPA hut
where the turtles lived outside in a mortared pit.
Their beaks would strain open
for the pink gobs of dog food
riding the tines of battered forks my job was to clamp
into the dark hands of juvenile delinquents from the city.
One night a raccoon, or a fox, I don’t know, climbed in
and opened the turtles as if they were clams
and left the hearts stretched on the ramparts
like surreal clocks—
even my thuggiest felon shivered as they ticked.
Little motorized phlegm-ball, little plug of chewing gum,
your secret is your frailty
once your outer walls are breached.
Makes me think of that submarine buried under the sea,
the sailors banging on the pipes
as if the water had ears.
Back in the lab, we fished up from the hole
the muscle’s pointy end and tied it
to an oscillograph whose pen-arm moved at first in even sweeps.
Until a drop
of substance X made the graph go wild—
the heart scrawling in its feral penmanship
see what little of yourself you own.
DENVER WILDLIFE RESEARCH CENTER
The coyotes had to eat, which was the reason for the few bedraggled sheep kept in a pasture by the freeway.
We entered wearing coveralls stamped Property of the United States, the crotch of mine holstering my knees, while my tall boss strained the hem of his armpit when he lifted his pistol.
The sheep fell hard, as though she dropped a long way down.
He strung her up by her feet on the fence and commenced sawing with a buck knife, to expose the entrails that shined like a bag of amber marbles.
These he tore out and threw into a bucket, before pinching off the bladder and spilling it by the fence, where steam rose from a patch of crusted snow.
You can throw up if you want to, he said, and, because I’d been given no job but to carry a pail, I understood this to be a kind of test.
A test to let him know what kind of daughter I would be: dogged, like a coyote, or meek, like the sheep, when, later, we would lace the carcass with poison to find out how much was needed to leave half the coyotes dead.
(Another test, the LD50: LD for lethal dose.)
More sheep-daug
hter than dog-daughter, I did not think about the coyotes who paced along the chain-link of their cages or about the barn owls who lived tethered to their boxes in a field of wild asparagus.
Instead of thinking I was making sure I didn’t throw up and didn’t faint, even though the insides of the sheep were hotter than I expected and smelled more sweet.
THE CHAMBER
As does the poem by William Blake, this involves a poison worm,
a worm that would make the blackbird who ate it
flap and squawk in distress
while at regular intervals I played a tape of a bird
also squawking in distress, so you see
there was this salt-box-girl regression going on
while I took notes: Now the bird is squawking in distress,
my job being to watch on closed-circuit tv
and record the bird’s death, were that to occur
in the chamber made from a gutted fridge
rigged up to a button in the next room
where, when I pushed, I’d hear a musical plink
over the loudspeaker as a mealworm dropped
from a crown of vials that sat on the chamber,
the crown rotating as the glass vials tipped,
one worm per plink, though I sometimes plinked twice
if the worm got stuck
or if the bird failed to squawk
in that tiny brick building that rustled with wings
from birds scritching in cages
I’d been filling for weeks,
my truck full of traps I set on fence posts at dawn,
when the redwings clung
to tall blades in the ditches
and sang shuck-shreeek as the dirt road fumed
behind me in the mirrors, while ahead bore a rising
redwinged sun that I drove into
feeling immortal,
how could I not feel immortal
when I was mistress of the poison worm?
SUPER 8
There were so many black birds I could not count,
homing on this patch of dusk. My boss’s idea
had been to spray them with spangles
so that, if found, the finder would know
the bird had stopped here at this cornfield
behind the Super 8 motel. That is,
if he could imagine the helicopter
with its tank of glue and light.
Otherwise, he might just wonder at a spangled bird.
We untangled them from the mist nets
and brought them into the bathroom’s white-tile grid
thirty feet east of the blacktop stripe,
where I counted the spangles, a soldier
in the tribe of useless data. Afterward