Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo
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7 First Epistle of Lucia to Her Old Boyfriends
8 Raised Not by Wolves
9 Job Site, 1967
10 Postcard from Florida
11 Transcendentalism
12 January/Macy’s/The Bra Event
13 The Van with the Plane
14 Snowstorm with Inmates and Dogs
15 Early Cascade
16 Twenty-Five Thousand Volts per Inch
17 The Garbo Cloth
18 A Pedantry
19 Martha
20 Breaking News
21 For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive in Our State
22 Altered Beast
23 On the Chehalis River
24 Inseminating the Elephant
25 For the Mad Cow in Tenino
from On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (2012)
1 The Second Slaughter
2 Again, the Body
3 To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall
4 Domestic
5 I Could Name Some Names
6 Cold Snap, November
7 Auntie Roach
8 Wheel
9 Pioneer
10 300D
11 Lubricating the Void
12 Freak-Out
13 Maypole
14 Les Dauphins
15 The Unturning
16 Bats
17 This Red T-Shirt
18 The Wolves of Illinois
19 Pharaoh
20 Samara
New Poems
1 Daisies vs. Bees
2 Bruce
3 Blacktail
4 The Great Wave
5 Water Theory
6 Elegy for Idle Curiosity
7 Belated Poem in the Voice of the Pond
8 Early December, Two Weeks Shy
9 *Speckled and Silver
10 My Only Objection
11 FREE
12 Eschatological
13 A Little Death, Suitable for Framing
14 Etiology of My Illness
15 Rotator Cuff Vortex
16 Message Unscripted
17 Women in Black
18 The Rape of Blanche DuBois
19 What I Know
20 Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones
21 Yellow Claw
22 Day-Moon
About the Author
Books by Lucia Perillo
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
from
Dangerous Life
(1989)
Ah, my friend, I sometimes think that I
lead a highly dangerous life, since I’m
one of those machines that can burst apart!
NIETZSCHE
The News (A Manifesto)
So today, yet another Guyanese will try to run the border
dressed in a dead housewife’s hair—all they’ve recovered
since her disappearance in a downtown shopping mall.
An “incident,” the paper says. Another “routine occurrence”—
wresting my trust from the publicans
assigned to keeping us safe, whole. Rather:
vow to stay vigilant against the maiming
that waits in each landscape, even in this
mundane procession of muddy spring days. To see
the tenacity of rooted hair for what it is:
an illusion as fleeting as courage. To keep the meat
between one’s ribs from being torn, to keep the hard
marble of the cranium covered with its own skin.
To stay vigilant. To watch the signs of violence stirring
even in one’s own machine. To keep both breasts
attached and undiseased. To keep the womb empty;
and yet to keep the organs living there
from shriveling like uneaten fruit, from turning
black and dropping. And not to mistake the danger
for a simple matter of whether
to put the body on the streets, of walking
or of staying home—; there are household cleansers
that can scar a woman deeper than a blade
or dumdum bullets. The kitchen drawers are full of tools
that lie unchaperoned. Even with the doors and windows
bolted, in the safety of my bed, I am haunted by the sound
of him (her, it, them) stalking the hallway,
his long tongue already primed with Pavlovian drool.
Or him waiting in the urine-soaked garages of this city’s
leading department stores, waiting to deliver up the kiss
of a gunshot, the blunted kiss of a simple length of pipe.
But of course I mean a larger fear: the kiss
of amputation, the therapeutic kiss of cobalt.
The kiss of a deformed child. Of briefcase efficiency
and the forty-hour workweek. Of the tract home:
the kiss of automatic garage-door openers that
despite