Free On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths by Lucia Perillo

The Caucus

    I had my precinct wrong and went to Garfield Elementary
    where the hall monitors would not let me through

    because I live on the wrong side of the boundary. I could hear
    my neighbors, listening reasonably to one another,

    listening even to the man who is my adversary
    because he leaves his dog’s crap on the sidewalk’s grassy strip.

    If he wants to fly, Peter Pan has to focus very hard on Tinker Bell.
    If he is quiet and he concentrates, then he can fly.

    The girl who spoke sat in the hallway,
    so I asked if she was working on her reading. “No,

    she’s autistic those are her socialization cards,” said her mother,
    who asked if I would watch her girl (whose name was Terri)

    so she (the mother)
    could take part in the caucus.

    He can fly only when he focuses on Tinker Bell.
    He can focus only when he listens.

    In the classrooms, my neighbors sat in chairs
    that shrank their knee-chin distance pitifully. I heard my adversary

    say he didn’t think the candidate looked authentic enough
    and that’s how history gets made. Quick

    write it down before it slips
    too far downstream.

    Peter Pan likes to sing and hear Tinker Bell sing.
    When he hears Tinker Bell sing, Peter Pan is happy.

    In the classroom, something was decided—
    I heard the collective exhale of assent

    before people filed out, looking giddy and grave. When she returned
    I asked Terri’s mother what was up

    with the singing, and she said that other children
    tormented her girl with songs.

    Go tell that to a poet.
    It would explain a lot about the current state of the art.

    Orpheus sang,
    and, like the Beatles, his song made the girls scream

    so loud they drowned the song. Then they yelled
    See yonder our despiser
and tore off his head.

    Peter Pan and Tinker Bell like to sing together
.
    They are very happy when they sing.

    You know one girl alone wouldn’t have done it,
    and this is not just a matter of strength. There’s a fuse

    running from one of us to the other— lucky thing
    all that’s in my pocket is this old packet

    of moist towelettes
    I mistook for a matchbook.

    She thanked me, the mother, even though Terri
    had been reading her cards to my dog. Note

    I carry a blue (biodegradable and perfumed)
    plastic crap bag, though it hadn’t been used yet,

    there at the school, and I was letting it flap
    from the pocket of my red flannel shirt

    like the American flag.
    Come, my adversary—

    let us discuss the warblers.
    How sweetly they torment us from the budding trees.

Domestic

    Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,
    feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store
    where they sell food that comes in cans
    yesterday expired. Picture it
    perching on the dumpster, a corrugated
    sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch
    accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,
    skittering on the cans. It has tried
    to gnaw them open and broken all its teeth.

    Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels
    of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon-
    chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells
    from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,
    with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light—”
    we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.
    Because we occupy the wrong animal— don’t you too feel it?
    Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?
    Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting
    your robe into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped
    fighting the urge to howl, and howled—
    and did it bring relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?

Skedans

    I paddled many days to reach the totem poles
    not barged off to Vancouver. Tilting in a clearing,
    gray and cracked, upholding the clouds,
    the grain for a hundred years having risen.
    The ghosts of Cumshewa Inlet kept trying to evict me,
    but I did not want to leave
    because the Haida had left their dead here
    and once you