‘Women Who Sleep on Stones’
— Reneé Bibby
Today, I turn 40. Forty is an age that calls for Lucia Perillo. Sure, there’s tinsel-grey hair (dyed bright purple) and a sharp ache in the left knee, but Lucia Perillo contrasts the body’s ageing with the burning vitality of spirit:
Women who sleep on stones are like
brick houses that squat alone in cornfields.
They look weatherworn, solid, dusty,
torn screens sloughing from the window frames.
But at dusk a second-story light is always burning.
The aches of the body are catalogued, the pooling of blood and weight of flesh detailed with elegant frankness. Yes, my “hips creak and their blades are tender.” I am a woman whose body has interminably shifted under the weight of time and gravity, and I adore Perillo for making it beautiful—an act of resistance to rise each day and continue to exist in a world that is ready to relegate a woman of a certain age to the fringes.
So, on my 40th birthday I claim to be a woman a who sleeps on stones:
The next day they’re sore all over and glad
for the ache: that’s how stubborn they are.