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 the dropped eyelid of their descent do nothing

to bar a terror needing no window for entry:

it resides within. And where do we turn for protection

from our selves? My mother, for example, recommends marriage—

to a physician or some other wealthy healer. Of course

it’s him, leering from his station behind her shoulder,

who’s making her say such things: the witch doctor,

headhunter, the corporate shaman, his scalpel

drawn & ready, my scalp his ticket out.

Copyright Credit: Lucia Perillo, "The News (A Manifesto)" from Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones. Copyright © 2016 by Lucia Perillo. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: Time WIll Clean the Carcass Bones (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)