Lucia PerilloUrban Legend
Like many stories, this one begins with Jesus-- well he sure looks like Jesus, this guy pulled over by the ditch. Let's say the tarp has blown off the back of his Isuzu pickup. Let's say that the apostles are slowly rising heavenward. See them twisting in the thermals, in this sky that's not a joke even if these fugitives could figure in a gag's protracted set-up. Calling for the hauling of twelve helium-filled desire dolls-- to a toga party. See how the apostles all have boners underneath their robes. And isn't that like me, to put the boners into play, however inappropriate, when this is not a joke. This is not a joke because the story wants to go into the record. Yes it does want. The story has a little mind that thinks. And the mind sends its ambassadors: these poodles nuked in microwaves, bonsai kittens, sewer crocodiles, rats suckled in maternity wards. I believe in the fatal hairdo just for the love of saying fatal hairdo. And I believe in the stolen kidney because I too have woken up with something missing. But I haven't spoken yet of the rapture, another word whose saying is like dancing at a toga party after downing many shots. Who hasn't tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity's lead coat? Who doesn't have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage? So back to Jesus, back to daylight, and you can make the dimwit me who launches herself into the updraft of the rapture and goes sailing straight through the story's sunroof. Above, the bonsai kittens pad the sky as cherubim. Below me, hairdos right and left are going up in smoke. Now the apostles are storming heaven, the Isuzu's motor's ticking while the left hand of Jesus forms a ledge above his brow. And you, earth angel, fear not my crash landing in the diamond lane-- the vinyl men are full of noble gas, and I'm rising on my balsa wings.Shrike Tree
Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree, a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill. The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree's black thorns and the sun had stripped them of their feathers. Some of the dead ones hung at eye level while some burned holes in the sky overhead. At least it is honest, the body apparent and not rotting in the dirt. And I, having never seen the shrike at work, can only imagine how the breasts were driven into the branches. When I saw him he'd be watching from a different tree with his mask like Zorro and the gray cape of his wings. At first glance he could have been a mockingbird or a jay if you didn't take note of how his beak was hooked. If you didn't know the ruthlessness of what he did-- ah, but that is a human judgment. They are mute, of course, a silence at the center of a bigger silence, these rawhide ornaments, their bald skulls showing. And notice how I've slipped into the present tense as if they were still with me. Of course they are still with me. They hang there, desiccating by the trail where I walked back when I could walk, before life pinned me on its thorn. It is ferocious, life, but it must eat then leaves us with the artifact. Which is: these black silhouettes in the midday sun strict and jagged, like an Asian script. A tragedy that is not without its glamour. Not without the runes of the wizened meat. Because imagine the luck!--: to be plucked from the air, to be drenched and dried in the sun's bright voltage-- well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless. With a chunk of sky in each eye socket. And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl.
Lucia Perillo has published three books of poetry, the most recent of these being The Oldest Map with the Name America (Random House, 1999). Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in many magazines and have been reprinted in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies. In the year 2000 she received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
