A Romance
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
to be snatched in an instant
and zipped into the crone-y-est of pocketbooks.
Radiance housed in rawhide again, as when it was living.
A steak can be stuck in your jeans when you’re skinny,
a rump roast is right for a puffy down coat,
small chops will fit under a thin peasant blouse
where it falls off the breasts
like a woodland rive
with a limestone amphitheater underneath.
Ancient city, ancient sublet, ancient wooden fire escape—
with my other bandits I learned to say how-de-do in French.
We were yanking on the cord that would start the motor of our lives
though we did not have the choke adjusted yet.
Sometimes it seemed I floated in the dregs like a tea bag
bloating up with facts.
Until a girl ran in the door, panting hard, face red,
slab thudding
from her snowflake-damasked waist onto the table,
and we stood around it gawking at the way it seemed to breathe.
Lucia Perillo, “A Romance” from Inseminating the Elephant. Copyright © 2009 by Lucia Perillo. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.
Source:
Inseminating the Elephant
(Copper Canyon Press, 2009)
