Medea
Each night when the sun dies
in a sky of shaded skin
when civil mothers
call their children in
I stand on a parapet
to call their spirits home
my voice a desert
my mouth a purse of bone.
© Cece Peri
Freud or Crick?
Old Freud believed that dreams fulfilled a wish
unleashing repressed fantasies of sex.
Or sagas of us following our bliss.
With loads of lessons hidden in subtext.
A primer I should sift through and decode.
So that my fragile ego won’t implode.
But crafty Crick envisioned housekeepers
collecting the minutia of the day.
To be stuffed into one venting sweeper
and summarily jettisoned away.
In which case, I should shun what dreams contain
and never even think of them again.
Yet, no matter how I brood: Crick or Freud?
Each morning, I wake clueless and annoyed.
© Cece Peri
This sonnet was awarded the first Anne Silver Award for Poetry from Speechless with a cash prize of $67—a sum settled on because it provides two cheap meals, two movie tickets, and a little gas money (the prize is now $87, probably due to the increase in gas prices).
Wedding Day Blues
for Elsa Lanchester
We have waited for her, breathless, through two reels.
She is conspicuously late. Right away,
there are signs things will not go well. See,
she’s high-strung and wrapped up in herself. But to the men
in the laboratory, and us in the audience, everything’s
forgivable in a seven-foot, grave but glamorous woman.
After all, she has put on a stylish dress, gotten her hair
smartly streaked and uber-permed. And she has caught
the eye of the groom. We are ready to see sparks fly.
The groom finds her appealing. He reaches
for this woo-man. She has found something appealing, too,
but it is not him. She is fixed on
her new legs, wants them to move more smoothly.
Wants her feet to set down more gently. Then,
she can get stockings and sling-backs.
Wedding bells cue the doctor to bring the couple together,
but she recoils. Her face looks like someone, perhaps the groom,
has emitted a foul odor. Still, the doctor persists, forcing her
to find a voice. She screeches, hisses,
as in hissssss face is unsightly, hissssss hands clumsy,
hissssss jacket inelegant, hissssss happiness is not my concern.
And this is it, the moment in the movie when we all hang
suspended in the knowledge that there will be no wedding
at the castle today. Electricity jolts
through the children’s section of the Culver Theater
where I watch this luminous creature throw a kiss-
my-ass bouquet directly to me—and I reach.
© Cece Peri
This was just a flat-out fun poem. It was published in the Speechless Goes to the Movies issue of Speechless.
Deadline for a Prose Poem
My poem won a prize, my prose poem, the one with the gun. Now, it’s in a book, and I’ll be reading it at coffee houses and upscale bars. Tom, an old neighbor, will hear about the poem from his sister, Lola. She'll hear from a neighbor or a friend because, in the poem, I mention the address of Tom's old house, 455 Crescent Rise, and the purple refrigerator on the back porch. Maybe, Lola will send him a copy of the book, or call him and read him the poem. Or maybe just read the parts about the tortured rabbits and cats, the garage filled with sheets of heavy vinyl and sacks of lye, and how one night the cops got an anonymous call about screams coming from the attic. Only the cops didn't go into the attic right away because Lola kept them talking on the porch. By the time they got upstairs there was only a TV that she said was playing a horror movie at the time of the complaint.
After the cops' visit, Tom closed down the house and moved away—but when he hears about my poem, he'll be back. Maybe, he'll come to one of my readings and stay until it's my turn. I'll be wearing short white socks and black-strapped shoes like the ones he made the girl wear—just another runaway, for whom there’s no accounting and no justice. Then, he’ll hear the part about the gun; the one he kept in a holster on one shoulder while he balanced a video camera on the other. A gun like the one I've been practice-shooting out by the observatory. By then, he'll have figured out that everything was seen through the attic window, and he'll know that view is only possible from one other house. The house across the culvert. The one whose garage now has its own vinyl sheets and sacks of lye. The house where—after the reading—maybe he’ll stop by.
© Cece Peri
This came from my frustrations working with the New York State Social Services and Foster Care systems.
