Lucia Perillo - Inseminating the Elephant

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This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible .

One of these days I’m going to get myself an avatar

so I can ride an archaeopteryx in cyberspace—

goodbye, the meat cage.

Pray the server doesn’t crash, pray

against the curse of carpal tunnel syndrome.

But then my friend the lactation consultant

brings up the quadriplegic who gave birth

(two times no less)

(motorcycle wreck)

just to make her body do

one thing the meat could still remember.

Somebody has to position the babies

to sip the breastmilk rivulets.

And the cells exude

despite their slumber. One minute

too much silence, the next there’s so much screaming.

Turns out Madagascar’s giant cockroach

makes a good addition to a robot

because the living brain adds up to more than: motor,

tracking ball, and the binary numeric code.

Usually the cockroach flees from light,

but sometimes it stands in its little coach unmoving,

stymied by the dumb fact of air.

And sometimes it rams into a wall

to force the world to show its hand.

Somebody left this white T-shirt

like a hangman’s hood on the new parking meter—

the magic marks upon its back say: I QUIT METH 4-EVER .

A declaration to the sky, whose angels all wear seagull wings

swooping over this street with its torn scratch tickets

and Big Gulp cups dropped by the curb.

Extra large, it has been customized

with a pocketknife or a canine tooth

to rough the armholes where my boobs wobble out

as I roam these rooms lit by twilight’s bulb,

feeling half like Bette Davis in a wheelchair

and half like that Hells Angels kingpin with the tracheotomy.

Dear reader, do you know that guy?

I didn’t think so. If only we could all watch the same tv.

But no doubt you have seen the gulls flying,

and also the sinister bulked-up crows

carrying white clouds of hotdog buns in their beaks:

you can promise them you’ll straighten up, but they are such big cynics.

I should have told you My lotto #’s 2-11-19-23-36

is what’s written in front, beside the silk screen

for Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks™—

which means you can’t hijack my name;

no, you have to go find your own, like a Hopi brave.

You might have to sit in a sweat lodge until you pass out

or eat a weird vine and it will not be pleasant. Your pulse

goes staccato like a Teletype machine — then blam

you’ll be transformed into your post-larval being.

Maybe swallowtail, maybe moth: trust me, I know

because once I was a baby blue convertible

but now I’m this black hot rod painted with flames.

My quarrel with the Old Masters is: they never made suffering big enough—

that tiny leg sliding into the bay almost insults me,

that it should be all we get of the falling boy after the half-hour stunt

of his famous flying. Don’t you see

they are cartoons? the drunk hissed

in the British Museum, a drunk in a sport coat

that made him look credible at first, some kind of docent,

an itinerant purveyor of glosses that left me

confused. I studied Brueghel’s paintings, tiny

skaters, and hunters come home with tiny dead animals

gutted outside the frame, where the tiny offal

presumably had been left. I was looking for Icarus

but the Musée des Beaux-Arts is in Belgium you twit

and so I did not see the plowman wearing his inexplicably

dainty shoes, a cartoon you American sow ,

and no one came to my rescue in that gallery vacated

even by its dust. Where I also did not see the galleon

anchored below the plowman’s pasture with its oblivious,

content-with-being-tiny sheep. But just wait

until that ship sails out

and encounters the kind of storm that’ll require Abstract

Expressionism to capture the full feeling of.

The giant canvases of the twentieth century!

Swaths of color with no figures in them at all!

How immense the drowning when you’re the boy who drowns.

Between the fireball on your back and the water in front

all gray and everywhere and hard as concrete when you smack down.

Many of the Girl Scout songs

extorted a smile, our servile mugging—

but this one we loved best.

Starring a calf being hauled in a minor key,

its refrain two mournful syllables: dona .

First came the long o —an induction/seduction

to join the animal’s cargo cult, then came

the short a , when the calf turned to beef

with no last meal and no reprieve.

The gist of the lyric: that we could choose

to be the calf in the cart or a bird in the sky;

the idea was simple, but also a lie: dona .

Bird is small and can fly where it wants

but it’ll never be Miss Teen USA,

whereas the word abattoir was a chic French kiss

our tongues would enter willingly.

Let that bird flitter off

like a dry dead leaf: this was a hymn

that we sang on our knees

on the dais by the flag, dressed in our sashes

and green berets like irregulars planning

a suicide mission: there was glory ahead

when we signed on, clambered into the wagon,

and let the future hitch up its horse.

I saw a child set down her binder like a wall

through the candy bin at the Corner Luncheonette

so she could scoop out gum while she spoke to the clerk—

and from that moment was in love: Oh theft .

College was supposed to straighten me

like a bent tree strangled by a wire,

but being done with sweetness I could not resist the lure of meat.

How the red muscle gleamed in its shiny wrap,

a wedge that had once been the thigh or the loin

of a slow brute’s body, sugar-dirt and clotted grass