Lost Innocence of the Potato Givers

by Lucia Perillo

They're just a passing phase. All are symptoms
of our times and the confusion around us.
-Reverend Billy Graham on The Beatles

At first we culled our winnings from the offering
of fists--
one potato, two potato-- untill we realize that such
random calibration
was not real test of love. So we cultivated pain:
hunkering on the macadam
sun-baked for hours in the schoolyard, our panties
bunched beneath our skirts.
The girl who could sit there longest would gain title
to the most handsome Beatle, Paul.
John George Ringo-- the rest were divvied according to
whose buttocks were most scarlet.
And when our fourth-grade teacher asked why we wore such
tortured looks through long division,
we shrugged, scritching our pencils over fleshy shapes
of hearts and flowers.

Ed Sullivan started it, his chiseled and skeletal stub
of a head, his big shoe
stomping our loyalties to the man-boys Dion
and Presley.
Even priggish neighbor Emily said I had to kneel before
the TV as though praying.
Then the pixels assembled the audience's exploding
like a carcass when it's knifed,
and I copied the pose assumed on-screen: hands pressed
against sides of my skull
like a bald dwarf who stands goggle-eyed on a jetty
in Munch's painting, and screams.
My mother rushed to the basement, a dishrag dripping
from her soaped hand.
What's wrong? she yelled. Are you hurt? What in godsname
is all this screaming?

February 1964: Johnson's choppers were whopping up the sky
over the Gulf of Tonkin.
Despite the tacit code of silence about the war, somehow
they must have known:
on television, girls were brawling drunkenly and raking
fingernails across their cheeks,
ripping their own hair in vicious chunks, as though beauty
were suddenly indulgent or profane.
That night in Saigon's Capital Kinh-Do Theatre, three GIs
got blown up during a strip show.
But of course I didn't know that. I couldn't have even
found Saigon on a map.
Girls were limp in the arms of riot-geared policemen,
who carried them off like the dead,
and my mother was stunned when she saw I'd torn my shirt
over my not-yet-breasts.

After that, I kept everything a secret, the self-inflicted
burn and scars and nicks.
I was doing it for love love love: the stones in my shoes,
the burrs in my shirt,
the mother-of-pearl penknife I used for cutting grooves
in my thumb or palm
whenever I need to swear some blood pact with another
disenthralled potato giver.
We spent recess practicing how to tick our tongues
in Paul's imaginary mouth,
letting everything drain out until we were limp, nothing,
sucked right into the earth.
Then we would mash our bodies against the schoolyard's wide
and gray-barked beech,
which was cruel and strong and unrelenting, smooth and cold,
the way we hoped our husbands would be.

from Body Mutinies.