Poetry: Lucia Perillo

by Lucia Perillo from The Body Mutinies

Thinking about illness after reading about Tennessee fainting goats

Maybe they're brethren, these beasts bred clumsy,
hobbling stiff-legged over cheatgrass tufts.
Prized for how they'll freeze unpredictably
then fall, rehearsing their overwrought deaths.
Sometimes it's the woman who brings the meal
who sets them off by wearing yellow slacks,
or sometimes the drumming a certain wheel
makes on the road's washboard. Stopped in their tracks
they go down like drunks: Daisy and Willow
drop always in tandem, while Boot will lean
his fat side first against the hug-hut door.
How cruel, gripes a friend. But maybe they show
us what the body's darker fortunes means-
we break, we rise. We do what we're here for.