Lucia Perillo: Inseminating the Elephant

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.

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.

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

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 .

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-daughter 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.

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