Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo

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СКАЧАТЬ today, yet another Guyanese will try to run the border

      dressed in a dead housewife’s hair—all they’ve recovered

      since her disappearance in a downtown shopping mall.

      An “incident,” the paper says. Another “routine occurrence”—

      wresting my trust from the publicans

      assigned to keeping us safe, whole. Rather:

      vow to stay vigilant against the maiming

      that waits in each landscape, even in this

      mundane procession of muddy spring days. To see

      the tenacity of rooted hair for what it is:

      an illusion as fleeting as courage. To keep the meat

      between one’s ribs from being torn, to keep the hard

      marble of the cranium covered with its own skin.

      To stay vigilant. To watch the signs of violence stirring

      even in one’s own machine. To keep both breasts

      attached and undiseased. To keep the womb empty;

      and yet to keep the organs living there

      from shriveling like uneaten fruit, from turning

      black and dropping. And not to mistake the danger

      for a simple matter of whether

      to put the body on the streets, of walking

      or of staying home—; there are household cleansers

      that can scar a woman deeper than a blade

      or dumdum bullets. The kitchen drawers are full of tools

      that lie unchaperoned. Even with the doors and windows

      bolted, in the safety of my bed, I am haunted by the sound

      of him (her, it, them) stalking the hallway,

      his long tongue already primed with Pavlovian drool.

      Or him waiting in the urine-soaked garages of this city’s

      leading department stores, waiting to deliver up the kiss

      of a gunshot, the blunted kiss of a simple length of pipe.

      But of course I mean a larger fear: the kiss

      of amputation, the therapeutic kiss of cobalt.

      The kiss of a deformed child. Of briefcase efficiency

      and the forty-hour workweek. Of the tract home:

      the kiss of automatic garage-door openers that

      despite the dropped eyelid of their descent do nothing

      to bar a terror needing no window for entry:

      it resides within. And where do we turn for protection

      from our selves? My mother, for example, recommends marriage—

      to a physician or some other wealthy healer. Of course

      it’s him, leering from his station behind her shoulder,

      who’s making her say such things: the witch doctor,

      headhunter, the corporate shaman, his scalpel

      drawn & ready, my scalp his ticket out.

First Job/Seventeen

      Gambelli’s waitresses sometimes got down on their knees

      searching for coins dropped into the carpet—

      hair coiled and stiff, lips coated in that hennaed shade of red,

      the banner-color for lives spent in the wake of husbands

      dying without pensions, their bodies used in ceaseless

      marching toward the kitchen’s mouth, firm legs

      migrating slowly ankleward. From that doorway,

      Frankie Gambelli would sic a booze-eye on them,

      his arms flapping in an earthbound pantomime of that

      other Frank: The Swooned-Over. “You old cunts,”

      he’d mutter. “Why do I put up with you old cunts?”—

      never managing to purge his voice’s tenor note

      of longing. At me—the summer girl—he’d only stare

      from between his collapsing red lids, eyes that were empty.

      Once I got stiffed on a check when a man jerked

      out of his seat, craned around, then bolted

      from those subterranean women, sweaty and crippled

      in the knees. Though I chased him up the stairs to the street,

      the light outside was blinding and I lost the bastard

      to that whiteness, and I betrayed myself with tears.

      But coming back downstairs my eyes dried on another vision:

      I saw that the dusk trapped by the restaurant’s plastic greenery

      was really some residual light of that brilliance happening

      above us on the street. Then for a moment the waitresses

      hung frozen in midstride—cork trays outstretched—

      like wide-armed, reeling dancers, the whole

      some humming and benevolent machine that knew no past, no future—

      only balanced glasses, and the good coin in the pocket.

      Sinatra was singing “Jealous Lover.” All of us were young.

Dangerous Life

      I quit med school when I found out the stiff they gave me

      had book 9 of Paradise Lost and the lyrics

      to “Louie Louie” tattooed on her thighs.

      That morning as the wind was mowing

      little ladies on a street below, I touched a Bunsen burner

      to СКАЧАТЬ