Perillo, Lucia M.

English

Syracuse University Research Facility and Collaborative Environment

GRAB BAG Marshall Street Marilyn By Lucia M. Perillo On the Marshall Street Poster of Marilyn Monroe I go by you every day, White Lady, I go by. In the window of the Pakistani's headshop, you stand over the hookahs and toe rings, Zigzag and EZ Wider. Bent toward me in your black-net jet-bead skin-tight nothing, your breasts don 't spare me anything except the nipples. Those you keep for yourself, the ruby quarters you' lllet drop in no one's slot, while your hands hang palm-outward like a begged question, gimmee-gimmee-gimmying around your knees. Me, I sweep guts in the butcher shop next door, where the flesh is skinned and flayed and swings on hooks, slowly in the window. The blood gets washed down drains, but the smell lingers. For lunch, a dozen chicken wings from Sal's Bird land, and I sit on the broken wall at front row center, watching you across the street, how you eye the cars laying their cataracts of soot. My teeth gnaw at hollow bones while I think of angels. Like these dumb clucks, our lives are spent in cages that have made our bodies thick, useless for sex or flight. Instead they hook us up to tubes and suck us dry: I could run my lips across your glass pane and still leave no trace. White Lady, Little Sheba, Madonna of the Snows-your hair is the color of blank paper or heroin or a clean set of sheets, the nostrils and lashes black as Chinese words on the ricepaper of your face. At seventeen you learned to smile with your lips half-open, your tongue paused in the hollow of your mouth-and I can't keep my eyes off it, like my own tongue working on a broken tooth. Each day this street goes black then white then black again and nothing seems to change. You' re twenty-five to my nineteen and my pocket's fu ll of change too easily spent. Oh my white pearl, my platinum timepiece, my no-rust Amazon-your being dead now might just be a good thing 'cause if you weren't dead you'd probably just be old. Both poems copyright© 1991 by Lucia Maria Perillo 48 • SY RA CUS E UN I VE R S I T Y MA GAZ I NE July 4, 1966 Glowing punks were clamped between our teeth as we waited for the dark to turn our itchy summer skin a cooler blue. Waited for the fireworks to shoot from the bridge that arched the wide mouth of the Tappan Zee. T here a lucky man would be sticking butts of rockets in a pail of sand: T he Shooting Lotus, Fox and Hen, The Fire Buddha With Report ... In the night beyond our dimming vision, he would touch his punk to the fuse like God waking Adam in the Sistine Chapel, only backwards, because he was a man and the rocket was god. Five days ago American boys in Skyhawk bombers had raked the night above Haiphong. And as we strained the opaque silence for the whine of bombs and engines overhead, we could have sworn we felt them coming, the thrill of gory havoc in 0ur bones. When the starbursts finally appeared, we saw cities burning all across the sky. For half an hour, the rockets flared and ricoche ted so loud our jaws ached. When it was over, my brother set down a smuggled "Bombing Plane" on top a rock, lit it and threatened to push one of us into the conflagration. But instead of roaring upward with a trail of sparks and gases, the rocket coughed and wallowed in the sedge. Far away, on terraces of grand, colonial hotels boys not much older than ourselves were drinking beer, recounting victories while the limbless wounded jeered and crawled like crabs across the ti le. The soldie rs must have kept the ir eyes fixed on their own white faces, the way we locked our sights onto the pale moon of my brother's face-looking duped and cheated, in the end afraid to see what lay the re hissing on the ground. IJJJ> LUCIA MARIA PERILLO grew up in New York City and attended SU's Creative Writing Program, earning her master's degree in 1986. Her. book Dangerous Life, pub-1 ished in 1989 by Northeastern University Press, was se-lected for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber Award, given to the best first book of poems publ ished each year. This fall, she joins the creative writing facu lty at Southern Illinois University. 1Perillo: Grab BagPublished by SURFACE, 1991

Grab Bag: Marshall Street Marilyn

https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1310&amp;context=sumagazine

Grab Bag: Marshall Street Marilyn

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