Lucia Perillo: Inseminating the Elephant

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

red-winged sun that I drove into

feeling immortal,

how could I not feel immortal

when I was mistress of the poison worm?

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

I walked them back outside two at a time

and opened my fists, where the birds paused

just long enough to leave their own data on my palms.

Here’s what we think of

your spangles, your starlight . Then the night flushed

them up into its swoon — however faintly,

the corn glittered as the birds resumed their ravening.

Only once did the frog come to mind: when the coroner

came to “first-aid training” at the fire station,

his slide carousel set up to eliminate

the easy pukers. The frog was not dead

but its brain had been pithed, which is what happens

when you stick a probe into the skull and wiggle.

You wind up with something dead enough

to let you stretch its tongue as thin and wide

as a cellophane sheet, which I did so

eagerly, back in the lab. The coroner said:

Here is the fat guy whose Chihuahua

gnawed through his stomach. Click.

Here is the farmer who hanged himself in his silo.

(I noted his foreshortened dangling feet.) Click.

It had been thrilling to see the frog’s blood cells

jerking through the narrow capillaries. Here

is the woman who swallowed the bottle of Drāno.

Click. Here is the man who just Sawzall-ed

his neck clean through. Click. Here is the guy

who shot off his head, but wait: he’s still living,

which is what happens if the brain stem’s left intact.

Click. The coroner said we should aim for the base

not the top of the skull and remember to turn down

the heat. Click. There are many people in this world

on whom nobody checks in very often. Click.

The warmer the room, the quicker a body

will turn black and bloat. Click.

If you have a dog it is important to leave out

what seems like an inordinate amount of dog food.

Click, click, then there was nothing

but a slab of light to signal he was through.

And it was then that I remembered the frog,

not that the coroner had spoken of frogs.

What he said was,

If we saw the cops outside, smoking cigars,

that’s when we’d know we had a stinker.

Most of the hospital’s emergencies lay

on gurneys that made a chickadee noise—

eent eent eent —as they rolled on rubber wheels.

But the girl with the bellyache just walked in

clinging tight to her purse, protecting the pain,

as if she feared its being kicked.

Meanwhile an old woman whimpered in the next room

help me, god help me —here’s the main thing I learned:

if trouble comes with an odor,

everyone scrams. That’s how it was in the ER

where I ghosted the halls, for the red appliqué

the college ambulance corps wore on its sleeve—

I would rescue the beauties

who jumped off the campus walkway bridge

and lay on the pavement like old flowers pressed in books.

In the kitchenette lounge, one surly doc asked:

So who’s going to tell her she’s knocked up?

— cut to the girl who’d been waiting for hours

lit by a long bulb flickering out.

As for the doctors, well it would be easy

to harp on their chuckling, or sneer at the gum

they snapped with the vampire prongs of their teeth

or the way they used cold half-cups of coffee

to drown their cigarettes. But it was they

who called me to press on the man

whose heart had run through the course of its years,

millions of spasms in the box of his ribs—

later, on my doughnut napkin

I would calculate: a quarter billion.

And though they made fun of the similar girl,

they brought in a step stool for me to climb on

for the minutes required for their clean consciences

to declare him dead. (Six.) Their jimmy-legs tapped

as they studied the clock, while I studied the chest

bending under my palms

while the old woman cried help me, god help me ,

and the young one hugged her purse like a doll

while tick tick tick , the miraculous ticking of ticks:

life ratcheted up inside her.

The old woman in the parking lot

wields her walker not unspryly. Gray hair

lank and without style, hanging

under her ski hat, as I wear a ski hat—

her legs bare under her skirt,

my legs bare under my skirt,

she wears sneakers, I wear sneakers—

windbreaker, windbreaker. She rolls up

to watch me board, as people do,

because it is interesting

to see the wheelchair maneuvered backward

into the van. You got it?

she asks, as people do

though I am not their child.

We are not sisters either,

despite the wind’s ruffling our skirts in sync—

oh how she is interested in the ruffling of my skirt.

The ruffle makes her giddy, starts

her bald gums racing on their wordless observations

as she peers into my thighs.

How alike we are! says this

no-sister of mine to be argued with,

just some crazy old woman

flashing the terrible crater of her smile

to raise the wind and

prove her point.

At night the bones move where the animals take them,

bones of the girls that once were girls,

the hand-bones missing, you know how it goes,

you fill in the blank, the unimaginable X

of horrid futures. From bus stops

before dawn, from outside the maquiladoras

when the horizon bites the sun’s gold coin,

from the hundred places to fail to arrive at

or return from, the bones uncouple