In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem
  • Arielle Greenberg (bio)

for MTA

In this small, hard book,a photograph of a jar filled with candied cotton.What is its purpose, a spun glass full of glass,shot by glass lens and rendered through on plates of glass? [End Page 100]

O to contain my throat.O I mean for my throat to contain.I do not forget how I stood at the base of a mountain,burning down gold, my tongue numb—I sometimes dream in that second language.I book in that hard tongue.

Balls, says the daughter of the traitor. Ballocks.But still—and as many daughters who swiftly move their hipsto collect strands of glassy glass spinning—they stood at the base of a spine in the gold sand and were One.

Cotton balls, but they look like candy.They look like paradise, rendered this way, like meat.They look like a word I know.

When I cannot swallow,I reach for the carafe of second language and drink it down.It burns like that rich gold of pregnant sickness,of having a girl and giving her, too, to God,a hard locket on a chain, a photograph unsilvering behind glass.

Picture it: a book haloed over a mountain,and language the jeweled spine leading down.All around the base is the shattered sweet of fragile joy, of selection.

O I do not mean to obscure.I do not forget anything though I grow loose from lack of usage.O I mean I levitate above the peak and peek in:city I have birthed and fling from my hands like cuts of glass.And sing from under the flat of my mouth's top layer.

©Arielle Greenberg and printed with permission

Arielle Greenberg

Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005), Given (Verse, 2002) and the chapbook Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). She is co-editor of two anthologies: with Rachel Zucker, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (Iowa, 2008); and with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2010). She is the founder-moderator of the poet-moms listserv and is an Assistant Professor at Columbia College Chicago.

...

pdf

Share