Lucia Perillo: Inseminating the Elephant

we have only a few more hours of night

to be held together by neither our wife’s nor our mother’s arms.

In Bloomington, Indiana, the librarian lugged it from the archive

in a cardboard box, the kind that long-stemmed roses come in —

there was even tissue paper she unfolded

like someone parting a lover’s blouse

or like the skin of a corpse being peeled by a pathologist,

this librarian who wore white gloves

when she poked her eraser at the braid as if it might explode.

And I made a mental note to write but could not decide if I should start

with the waxy clots of follicle, or the bristle of split ends —

what word to describe the loose strands’ electrostatic web?

I start to write and wander into the tangle of my wondering

whatever happened to that yellow paper-mâché horse

displayed in our dining room where I grew from my pogo stick

into my humid secondary sexual characteristics?

Now it must fertilize a flower bed in some suburban subdivision

erected over the detoxified county dump.

Where rot the archives of the childhoods that we see

our therapists either to remember or to forget.

Because who has as much faith in the past as Sylvia Plath’s mother—

not to mention the muscle mass to lift the boxes?

And how many women leave Bloomington

with plans to write about the hair, which had a hint of purple

like the fuzz extruding from a thistle

when the flower after-blossoms on the green pineapplish nub?

Across America, women wad their paper asteroids

while dusty stallions are being pitched into the trash.

Pitched by widows moving into condominiums

because their daughters have skipped town. And we wonder

if they were just faking their pride in our poor creations,

with legs like bratwursts because I grew too excited

applying the paper strips like a trauma nurse.

Oh we are daughters without daddies

or sufficient antihistamines, drifting off to Bloomington

like spent weeds combing through the air.

Which reminds me — as per the static — how could I have lost it,

that word flyaway .

The whole waiting room

(Neurology Unit, seventh floor)

watches the balloon climb through the city, then turn

down a corridor leading to the sea.

Everyone looks.

And is joined in consensus

about the Happy Objects, overruling all elections.

Even the bad news does not come, not yet.

Later, the freeway:

when the dildo-franchise delivery truck speeds up

with two people painted on its side, sitting in bed

under the halos of their blissed-out brains—

I hoist my thumb like a good citizen.

But the driver has been trained by the corporation

(with a trendy slice of mirror on his eyes)

to sourpuss the glee through which he trolls his simulated genitalia.

Today the inanimate world rises up against him

as it hums without its batteries,

humming louder than the lightboard

where my cerebellum revealed its zones of mist

and its granules of ( very bad ) dark matter

over which Dr. Kita ran her lovely fingers.

Sixty miles, seven hawks,

after curling down the off-ramp

when the blue T. rex out front of Done-Rite Automotive

suddenly drops its head—

only then am I jabbed by one sharp astral needle.

Until the beast deflates

enough to reveal two men in the process of unpinioning

that vinyl dino with their greasy fingers.

Another day shot, death one spin closer

like the slice of pie that any luck might slide their way —

T. rex exhales one last blue breath,

and when the black palms wave, I wave.

Lucia Perillo grew up in the suburbs of New York City in the 1960s. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management and subsequently worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She then completed her M.A. in English at Syracuse University while working seasonally at Mount Rainier National Park.

In 1987 she moved to Olympia, Washington, where she taught at Saint Martin’s College. For most of the 1990s Perillo taught in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. She now lives back in Olympia with her husband and dog.

These poems first appeared in The American Poetry Review, Hunger Mountain, Indiana Review, Margie, The Mid-American Review, Narrative, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Northwest Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, Sycamore Review, Tin House, TriQuarterly , and Willow Springs .

“Breaking News,” which first appeared in Hunger Mountain , was published as a broadside by Stinehour Press.

I am grateful to the MacArthur Foundation and Claremont Graduate School for encouraging my work through their generous support. Thanks also to Tim Kelly, Hayden Carruth, Jane Mead, and Ben Sonnenberg for their willingness to read drafts of these poems. I also want to say (contrary to those who rant against the American medical machine) that I couldn’t write anything at all were it not for the people who maintain my organic matter with such genuine concern. So thanks, docs.

And I thank the inmates at the Washington (State) Corrections Center for Women, who trained my dog.