Lucia Perillo

Four Red Zodiacs

Because I'd drunk a lot of coffee on top of some antibiotics
strange ideas were already swimming in my brain
like sharks patrolling their aquarium walls
when I saw those strange rafts circling in the harbor.

Gatling was the word that came to mind
for the machine guns mounted on their turrets,
but Jim said I was wrong. And also:
Great, so now the war comes to Palookaville

while I stood too stymied for a superior thought.
Eventually we turned back from the window
to our task to prove ourselves
not easily deterred (or bored easily):

loading the truck with bags of garbage
so we could take them to the dump
Styrofoam boxes from the Vietnamese restaurants
by which we are sustained.

We came back dirty, so we washed,
then lay down predictably.
And it seemed oddly synchronous
that I'd just been reading Baudelaire,

who couldn't stand what sex did to the face. Meanwhile
a big ship slid into port
like a capsule sinking in the throat,
then some jeeps and Deuce earth movers drove aboard.

And we fucked right through it!--
an optimist might say that love prevailed.
But there is another way to look at it:
as greed, the body taking care of itself first

(although I didn't look, I never can stand to look).

Later I thought I saw a frogman
but it could have been a seal.
I mean a real seal,
which is to say an animal.

Then you, hypocrite reader, you say: but we are all animals.

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Lucia Perillo's newest book of poems, Luck Is Luck, won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Prize. contents | previous | next