Nothin' But Mammals

In grade school our teacher made us watch a documentary about the Russian front in World War II. As the cruel winter rolled in it almost made you sorry for the Fascists: black figures wrapped in rags limping along snowbanks, leading gaunt skeletons that might once have been horses. They froze, they starved and eventually they retreated.


When the lights came back on, one of my classmates' eyes were red. She clutched a kleenex and began to sob. The teacher assumed the violence had unsettled her and made comforting noises, something about it's all over, it all happened in the past, those men fighting. 


"NO!" she blurted. "Those poor HORSES!"


I was enraged - she couldn't care less about the humans. It was those animals that aroused her pity and her sorrow. I think I understand her better now.

The Second Slaughter

Lucia Perillo

Achilles slays the man who slayed his friend, pierces the corpse
behind the heels and drags it
behind his chariot like the cans that trail
a bride and groom. Then he lays out
a banquet for his men, oxen and goats
and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat
until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.


The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—
in the morning more animals must be killed
for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds
no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;
not even heaving four stallions on the pyre
can lift the ballast of his sorrow.


And here I turn my back on the epic hero—the one who slits
the throats of his friend’s dogs,
killing what the loved one loved
to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent
by vanishing from my concern
after he throws the dogs onto the fire.
The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.


When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep
until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially
which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets
and tails like peacocks, covered in tar
weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows
at the rim of the marsh. But once


I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals
my first lament. So now I guard
my inhumanity like the jackal
who appears behind the army base at dusk,
come there for scraps with his head lowered
in a posture that looks like appeasement,
though it is not.