Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Lucia Perillo

      7  First Epistle of Lucia to Her Old Boyfriends

      8  Raised Not by Wolves

      9  Job Site, 1967

      10  Postcard from Florida

      11  Transcendentalism

      12  January/Macy’s/The Bra Event

      13  The Van with the Plane

      14  Snowstorm with Inmates and Dogs

      15  Early Cascade

      16  Twenty-Five Thousand Volts per Inch

      17  The Garbo Cloth

      18  A Pedantry

      19  Martha

      20  Breaking News

      21  For the First Crow with West Nile Virus to Arrive in Our State

      22  Altered Beast

      23  On the Chehalis River

      24  Inseminating the Elephant

      25  For the Mad Cow in Tenino

       from On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (2012)

      1  The Second Slaughter

      2  Again, the Body

      3  To the Field of Scotch Broom That Will Be Buried by the New Wing of the Mall

      4  Domestic

      5  I Could Name Some Names

      6  Cold Snap, November

      7  Auntie Roach

      8  Wheel

      9  Pioneer

      10  300D

      11  Lubricating the Void

      12  Freak-Out

      13  Maypole

      14  Les Dauphins

      15  The Unturning

      16  Bats

      17  This Red T-Shirt

      18  The Wolves of Illinois

      19  Pharaoh

      20  Samara

       New Poems

      1  Daisies vs. Bees

      2  Bruce

      3  Blacktail

      4  The Great Wave

      5  Water Theory

      6  Elegy for Idle Curiosity

      7  Belated Poem in the Voice of the Pond

      8  Early December, Two Weeks Shy

      9  *Speckled and Silver

      10  My Only Objection

      11  FREE

      12  Eschatological

      13  A Little Death, Suitable for Framing

      14  Etiology of My Illness

      15  Rotator Cuff Vortex

      16  Message Unscripted

      17  Women in Black

      18  The Rape of Blanche DuBois

      19  What I Know

      20  Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones

      21  Yellow Claw

      22  Day-Moon

        About the Author

        Books by Lucia Perillo

        Acknowledgments

        Copyright

        Special Thanks

from

       Dangerous Life

      (1989)

      Ah, my friend, I sometimes think that I

      lead a highly dangerous life, since I’m

       one of those machines that can burst apart!

      NIETZSCHE

The News (A Manifesto)

      So 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