Arielle Greenberg

Arielle Greenberg was born in 1972 in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Schenectady, New York. She attended Jewish day school; studied literature, performance art, and film studies at SUNY-Purchase; and received her MFA from Syracuse University. Her poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere, including two volumes of The Best American Poetry. Greenberg has served as poetry editor of Salt Hill and on the editorial board of How2, and is now poetry editor for the journal Black Clock and a founding editor of Court Green. She is the author of two books of poems—Given (Verse, 2002) and My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005)—and the coeditor, with poet Rachel Zucker, of a forthcoming anthology of essays by women poets on mentorship. Greenberg has taught at Syracuse and Bentley College, and now teaches at Columbia College Chicago, where she is Assistant Director of the Poetry Program. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, a few blocks from Lake Michigan.

Afterward, There Will Be a Hallway

The sky is violet like no other hypnosis.

Out the night window, the moon is a slip of coin over the skyscraperscape,

gold and red grids of night windows.

We (the clown, the doll, the murderer and I) are in love.

With the moon.

She ascends: the sky purples, clouds, she rises, now grinning,

becoming a burning door. We love her still.

So that when she begins the medusa eclipse,

we do not look away. We are sweetened.

We are sweetened out of sight.

The apocalypse afterwards is muddy and bound to our apartment.

Someone, one of us, takes advantage and is after. The rest of us collapse

in corners. Am I waiting for the soft thump or for administering it?

In the dark, our bodies are rag. We belong to the group. There is a limp,

and a dizzy.

Afterward, there will be a hallway. I am anxious at both ends.

Berlin Series

for E.

I.  Basement

If you don’t know boys, you can’t follow them. It has always been

this way. When I was smaller, boys were larger. They have circles

for heads, and in the cartoons, everything is backwards and made

from dots. In dreams, boys pray or they make trouble. It has

always been this way. This is a poem about a war.

II.  Dizzy

The music of the Ancient Egyptians was something like be-bop,

only more orange. The music of New Jersey is asphalt and brothers.

In the fields there is a horror that takes place. I ran from it,

knowing that the mouth of something which can’t speak is not

hardly a mouth at all. Music is in the organs. By this I mean the

heart and also the belly. Is music a criminal? I think that children

know this answer.

III.  Push

Vision is a guess made by the power of subtraction.

This is obviously about a person alone.

IV.  Casual

And here we again return to music and to felony.

Always where there is a radio there is the desire for company,

and the desire for relaxation, and also the desire, perhaps, for touch.

When I was a child I had many positions, and some of them

involved leaning and some made me expose my body. In this way I

made friends.

V.  This

If you live in a city your whole life, you naturally end up wanting

air. It is a natural thing. The children of cities, especially, let’s

say, the boys of smaller cities near the places they manufacture

newspaper, want air and they think they want trees. But they don’t

really want the trees. Ce n’est pas naturel. Neither is love.

VI.  This

We make marks, and in this way we are like the species of fish who

leave their ink when they are frightened. Artists are very much like

terror, terrified fish. At least, that’s the medical side of it. You

could say I got this piece of advice from my brother, but it is not

related completely.

VII.  Died

We do not trust ourselves. The chain of being is passed from

father to son. For me it was passed in a field with a spray can. It is

all in toys, the memory, and this shows how I am not ready to give

up the toy. This shows how all memory is false. As you can see,

this is about a lost dog.

Nostalgia, Cheryl, Is the Best Heroin

The house knows this and the kitchen knows this.

The shingles taste of lovers, and the little bedroom is the girl whose lover has bruised her into what he thinks he knows he wants.

He thinks. He knows. He wants. A dark little house. The afghan of tenderness.

In front of the bruise, the townspeople have gathered for the nod-out into plush plush love, so easy and out. The cabinet wants more. This community of beating. This neighborhood of oblivion. The cabinet has less and wants more.

This is a terrible story, Cheryl. It is an instructional essay for a sweet beating. It is an open letter to linen closets everywhere.

Where does the girl keep her lust for the past hidden, in case the punishers come?

The house pushes for its needs. He needs.

The dishtowels, Cheryl, they are all so limp, so exhausted from the avoidance of sex. The oven is white with love. The couch is falling in under the weight of personal memory: too tight, too wired.

An electric horse, this little house addiction.

The mouth of the garage is dry and has no bicycles.

The lover is beat and the lover is over.

Bend over, tender dream. And ready for the smack. The window-frames are abused of their hunger. And he forgets. And the house keeps on.

Saints

1) Knives of the Saints

I returned your book of poetry to the store.

I returned to the scene of the crime because once I’d had you

the words floated into a ribbon of type.

Because it was where we once slung violent hash.

I returned a favor.

I returned the box to its proper shelf

that made not sense to me smelling of lavender,

and it waited to be made into a miracle.

I came carrying my wings in my teeth.

I came to under the organza influence of your best slap.

I came out. I came around.

I came back like a cat, the kind from hell.

I came to believe I’d been returned.

2) Chives of the Saints

When the waiter said “you’re welcome”

she was waylaid, completely soup.

Dumplings healed her. Broth sustained.

Between the server and the servee passed

an Olympic torch of familyhood, a fruit crepe

of happiness. She was thankful for being welcomed

into his arms like a brown rice bowl.

She was thankful to be so single, so unbetrothed

to the service she gratefully received.

You are welcome, she thought of herself,

an utter dish festooned with gratuity.

3) Lives of the Saints

Most are quite ordinary.

They speak in English, the tongue of regular paperbacks.

They read for awhile, looking occasionally away.

They get hungry at the usual times slated for hunger.

They do not write the menu in script on a chalkboard held by a ceramic

pig in a toque.

They simply make humble but delicious

grilled cheese sandwiches, pressing their handprints

into the flaming bread, branding it,

blending ascientifically four kinds of cheese, including a dry jack.

They prefer to drink along a tomato juice.

They like to later drag a bicycle down from its stern hook and squeeze

the wheels.

They like to spend time in the garage, damply almost dying on purpose.

Then they go back inside the split-level ranch and eat potato chips,

casually licking the bottom of the bag salt from their fingers.

Analogies

Let’s play Houston We Have a Problem in which Houston

is to space program as bubble is to astronaut as crown is to queen

as queen is a golden shilling in the shoe of every solider whose

heart she owns in a little daggered box.

Let’s play Hunter

Bring Me the Heart of the Fairest Maiden in which

coffin is to promise as dwarf is to washing-day and drudgery

is a bramble of roses and thickets keep out villains from the bedroom.

Let’s play Hiding from the Nazis in Our Secret Annex

in which attic is to linen closet as map is to romance as certain death

is to romance as gasoline is to showerhead.

The mutable child is more like us every day:

mute, mutated, mutant. As speech is to therapy.

Let’s play Maryann and Mary Jane, Best Friends Forever

and Also Identical Twins, Run an Eternal Day Care

for Orphans and Autistic Babies Which Transcends Our Own Playing

So That Even When We Don’t Think We’re Playing We Are in which

the babies

are to wheelbarrows as apple tree is to biting red ants as mint bush leaves

are to the secret names of boys as nightgowns are to cartwheels

as fireworks are to piggyback and you go first.

Let’s play Veterinarian in which safety pin is to stitches

as Kleenex is to bandage for the amputated limb as you or I

are slightly more crippled for the better, from this game.