Lucia Perillo

Lucia Perillo Poems

Lucia Perillo Biography

Lucia M. Perillo is an American poet. Lucia Perillo grew up in the suburbs of New York City in the 1960s. She graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management, and subsequently worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her M.A. in English at Syracuse University, while working seasonally at Mount Rainier National Park, and moved to Olympia, Washington in 1987, where she taught at Saint Martin's College. For most of the 1990s, Perillo taught in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. Her work has appeared in many magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review. among others. A traditional poet of (mostly, but not exclusively) free-verse personal reflection, she has written extensively about living with Multiple Sclerosis in her poems and essays. On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths is her most recent book of poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). In 2012 she also published a collection of short fiction, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, which was shortlisted for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.)

The Best Poem Of Lucia Perillo

Early Cascade

I couldn't have waited. By the time you return
it would have rotted on the vine.
So I cut the first tomato into eighths,
salted the pieces in the dusk
and found the flesh not mealy (like last year's)
or bitter,
even when I swallowed the green crown of the stem
that made my throat feel dusty and warm.

Pah. I could have gagged on the sweetness.
The miser accused by her red sums.
Better had I eaten the dirt itself
on this the first night in my life
when I have not been too busy for my loneliness—
at last, it comes.

Lucia Perillo Comments