Tony Trigilio
Pictures of Famous Criminals
Newly married, the stress of living with my parents accumulated until one day, dizzy from the
pressure, we plotted. Slow at first, of course—nothing elaborate, two or three banks per week,
enough to afford a security deposit on an apartment and the extra we’d be forced to pay for the dog
we wanted. We argued about the kind of masks to wear. It was like fighting over what Halloween
characters to be. My parents gone to bed, we tacked pictures of famous criminals to the wall. Tania
robbing the Hibernia Bank with her captors. Bonnie goofing with Clyde in front of the flathead
Ford V8, the 20-round automatic Browning stuck in his stomach. The Baader-Meinhof wanted
poster, the two masterminds gazing off-camera like hipster graphic designers. Just by looking at the
pictures, we shut down the city—mind over matter, easy as winding up and slapping someone on
the cheek. Phones stopped working, our brainiac pulse bomb blacked out the grid. We shrunk the
world to a private filament, a burned-out halogen twig. Outside the bedroom window, where I used
to watch my father pitch horseshoes in the backyard and I helped string a fence around his tomatoes
to protect against rabbits—thrashing limbs, the tornado siren (“This is not a drill,” I said, and
laughed), hail cracking the concrete windowsill covered with black dust kicked up by the roofers this
week. We admired our pictures, the wind and the way it made us feel small. A round aircraft,
rotating whiplash fast, hovered high above the yard, size of a quarter held at arm’s length, then shot
up into the clouds and left a hole in the overcast. It stayed there until my father knocked. We lived
under his roof and couldn’t just ignore him. We pretended to be scared of this truly stunning
weather. I’m fairly certain he believed us. We admired the wind, the feeling like ice chunks caught
in downdraft. Pitch black and split the trees with lightning. Clusters of brick and glass we’d find at
daybreak—our fault entirely, but try to prove it.
Bio
Photo credit: Jacob S. KnabbTony Trigilio’s newest book is the poetry collection Historic Diary (BlazeVOX, 2011). He is a member of the core poetry faculty at Columbia College Chicago and co-edits Court Green.