Volume 16 ~ Spring 2004 ~ ISSN 1543-6063

ARIELLE GREENBERG

Baby Ointment


I’ve spent too much
silver, rings, tin-
type and am dry
now. If only a flash.
If only the outsider
would star me.

My seam has a seam

and a mind.
To be remembered
in straps. If I
am unsafe, keep
me a vial served
in frost, full of
ointment, perfume
of bebe elegante
rows and rows of
crusted sugar skull
dresses and twill.
Rubbed down.
Seal my seal with
my half.



Endearments


I use your familiar name, Rhino, name of the town, of the magazine, the theater festival, the new New life. It’s not short for anything.
I name you the name of the newspaper artist’s dog.
I have no name for you that does not belong to an animal.

I don’t have sex; I have a dog.
I don’t have time; I have a name.
I have a job. I have a hose. I have a rock. I have a louse.
I have a pillow that doesn’t recognize me when I come to it, using its endearments.
I am desperate to be inside the clockwork of your sweater, to be your bright red gear.



Creative Non-Fiction


A certain number of fruits have skulls—little known fact
you know too well. It’s the creative non-fiction
of the memoir of your most victimized story:
lost in the woods, stranded on a desert isle,
stepmother, stepfather, the arsenic
in the donuts and the birdseed and the house made of ginger,
the house made of flesh, the shoe made of glass, the hair
made of twine, the twine made of gold, the fruit
made of skull. You always knew it,
the traitor, the gravedigger, the butler
who had helped you into your ivory buttons
and then died out by the old cemetery,
by the bear tracks, by the train tracks,
the ties now dug up, an apple core in the dirt.

Poems © Arielle Greenberg 2004. All rights reserved.

Arielle Greenberg is the author of Given (Verse Press, 2002), and co-editor, with David Trinidad and Tony Trigilio, of a new poetry annual, Court Green. Her poems will appear in Best American Poetry 2004, Conjunctions, The Laurel Review, Spoon River, and other journals. She teaches in the poetry program at Columbia College Chicago.

Duncan Hannah
www.jamesgrahamandsons.com

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