On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths by Lucia Perillo

Author:Lucia Perillo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

300D

When he was flush, we ate dinner

at Tung Sing on Central Avenue

where my father liked the red-dye-number-toxic

bright and shiny food: spareribs, sweet-

and-sour pork— what else

was there to care about, except his sleep

under the pup tent of the news? And the car,

which was a Cadillac until he saw how they

had become the fortresses of pimps—

our hair may look stylish now,

but in the photograph it always turns against us:

give it time and it will turn. Maybe it was in 1976

he went to see the enemy, the man

(with sideburns) who sold German cars

and said: take it easy, step at a time,

see how the diesel motor sounds

completely different. So off he went tink-tink-tink

around the block in the old neighborhood

where he imagined people (mostly black: by now

his mouth had mastered the word’s exhale,

then cut) lifting their heads to look (-kuh).

And he, a short man, sat up taller as he swung

back into the lot to make the deal, although

to mitigate the shift in his allegiances

(or was this forgiveness?— for the Germans

had bombed his boat as he sailed through Gibraltar)

he kept the color constant. Champagne,

the color of a metal in a dream, no metal

you could name, although they tried

with a rich man’s drink. He could afford it now

though it made him feel a little silly, his hand a lump

of meat around the glass’s narrow, girlish stem.

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