Lucia Perillo: Inseminating the Elephant

their linkages and travel separate ways.

Too many of them for just one theory—

too many skulls for the drug lords even,

for the husbands the satanists the cross-border whore-killers

…until you start to suspect the dirt itself.

Between the concrete wall and the drainage ditch,

the sheet-metal scraps and collapsed storm fence,

a desert of ocotillo scrub, not even one decent

cowboy cactus, one bent arm

swearing an oath of truth. When I was younger

I wrote this poem many times and don’t know

where I was going with it: so much worship

for every speck of mica giving off

a beam I made into a blade. And you can see

how I turned mere rocks into villains

when it turns out the landscape’s not at fault,

the parched land a red herring — this is not the song

of how the men fried while hiding inside the boxcar

(and even then someone outside locked the door).

My poems took place where the wind-skids sang:

perhaps I’ve been too fond of railroad tracks

and the weedy troughs alongside them, which do

accept most everything. Especially the spikes,

how I loved those spikes cast into silence,

in this case behind the factories, where the grass

grows sparser than in the poor soils of Texas,

a place with completely different ghosts

lying just over the river. To get there

you will have to pass by a large pink cross

made out of such spikes at the border station,

and here’s the main thing, forgive me, I missed in my youth:

how from each spike hangs a name.

While the spectacular round butt of the fat junkie sitting on the curb

rotated upward from his belt—

the legs of the skinny junkie wriggled upward from a dumpster.

And when he stood, I saw

his familiar figure, thinned—

two times he’d snipped my kitchen with the scissors of his hips

while he directed stories from the rehab clinic toward us

ladies in our panty hose,

our fingers sliding up and down our wineglass stems.

Later, in the cloak of his jean jacket,

he slipped upstairs and stole my pharmaceuticals,

my legitimate pharmaceuticals!—

so an awkwardness descended on the realm of gestures

there in the alley behind the YMCA, where I looked at any alternate—

pothole, hydrant, not buttocks,

don’t look at buttocks, don’t look at dumpster, don’t. Look:

I would have been a crone to him,

and he would have been my pirate son,

my son who sleeps beneath the bridge

in the cloak of his jean jacket, dabbed with fecal matter now.

Still, when he comes at night,

brass button by button

and blade by blade — his skinny thighs—

I open myself like a medicine cabinet

and let him take the pill bottles from my breasts.

Not infrequently I find myself wondering which of you are dead

now that it’s been so long since I have had a boyfriend

for whom this wonder would be a somewhat milder version of

the way our actual parting went — i.e., with me not wondering

but outright wishing that an outright lightning bolt

would sail sharply into your thick heads.

Can I plead youth now over malign intent?

And does my moral fiber matter anyhow

since I have not gone forth and et cetera’d—

i. e., doesn’t my absent children’s nondepletion of the ozone layer

give me some atmospheric exchange credits under the Kyoto Protocol

to release the fluorocarbons of these unkind thoughts?

Anyhow what is the likelihood of you old boyfriends reading this

even if you are not dead? Be assured your end is hypothetical.

Also be assured I blush most furiously

whenever that tower room in Ensenada comes to mind

where the mescal functioned as an exchange credit for those lies you told

about your Alford pleas and your ex-wives who turned out not ex at all.

Anyhow the acid rain has caused my lightning to go limp

over bungalows where you have partial custody of your teenagers

and AA affirmations magneted to the fridge

from which your near beers sweat as you wonder if I’m dead,

since the exchange for this-here wonder is your wonder about me.

Even though it shows my nerve — to think you’d think of me at all—

I await word of your undeadness

P.S. along with your mild version of my just reward.

The family sank into its sorrows—

we softened like noodles in a pot.

Whereas the bicycle’s bones were painted gold

and stood firm against the house

no matter how hard it rained.

Beneath the handlebar mount, it said royal in red letters

unscathed despite the elements;

this was the bicycle’s first lesson,

to be royal and unscathed—

I pressed my ear-cup to the welds.

Pedal furiously, then coast in silence .

You will need teeth to grab the chain .

Exhortations with the stringent priggishness of Zen,

delivered by a guru who hauls you off and wallops you

in answer to your simple question.

Though its demise is foggy,

I can conjure with precision its rebukes, the dull sting

when the boy-bar bashed my private place.

Then no talking was permitted

beyond one stifled yelp.

You could, however, rub the wound

with the meat of your thumb — so long

as you did this stealthily, pretending you had an itch.

Amphicar rolls across the breakfast table

as the happy family plunges into the river—

don’t worry. I’ve just trolled them from the river

of human news. Today’s lifestyle feature:

this convertible that once topped my desires,

all my crackpot desires

(my parents would not buy one to drive the filthy current).

Instead we rode a station wagon into our oblivion,

when we could have ridden into our oblivion

with the means of rescue. In the famous myths

how many souls got banished to the underworld

(or turned into trees, their arms the branches whorled)

and were doomed because they let themselves be driven

over death’s river (or into the tree)

without a plan for their re-entry

into living human form? In my actual river I never stepped down

because, the myth went, its bottom was shit,

and when the mayor confessed it was actual shit

the world proved itself to be a sluice of lies

even if the water was blue

or sort of blue.

Amphicar would have wheeled right through it,

manufactured ’61 through ’68, the years of my youth

(my banished-to-the-back-of-the-station-wagon youth),

with no propeller or white leather seats,

no top rolled down, no fishing pole slanting up.

No one listened to me: how we could just drive up

on the shores of Hell, and tan on that beach for a while.

If we only had an Amphicar. Then when we grew sick for home

we could have crossed back home.

Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s

downward stroke, another brick set

then the flat side of the trowel moving

across the top of the course of bricks.

My father stepped from the car in his brown loafers,

the rest of him is fading but not his loafers,

the round spot distended by his big toe.

Brick laid down, scritch of the trowel’s

downward stroke, the silver bulb of the door lock