Arielle Greenberg

FEATURED WORK
• X of Squeaky
• In The Moody
• Dollhouse Dinnerbell

X of Squeaky

Where other people might notice a third eye,
semaphored as a peacock, twinkling like code in the forehead,
that man assumes a Manson family disciple of everyone.
That man has been out of high school a long time,
and it never fails to make him feint
to think of words scrawled in blood-luster on the walls,
to think of words at all, how they get used.
In the middle of every great idea, that man says,
is an X carved in its middling skin.
Just run the lyrics backwards through a dryer.
He has no irony about it in his laundry basket with the softener sheets.
I see him at my laundromat, that man.
His nervous hands hinder the process by which are bleached
the stained collars, the tell-tale, shirts like highways,
their shoulders crammed with the gravel and glass of past accidents,
sleeves skidded out. He looks like Charlie, that man,
screwy, spiral screws of detergent in his irises, the too-blank skin above.
I love him, want to have his baby, listen to the song again.

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In the Moody

We watched the Chinese movie behind the drapes
of our eyes, careful not to implicate the genitals of the other
in the pear-slices-in-light-syrup hushed tackle that came afterwards.
Little plum, our love was like a hairbrush:
quiet, with dirt and scrapes.
My bended coxa took on a righteous shape,
a silvery monk breathing near snow.
And oh, the foreignness! Each satin dress
a slipcover for the muted body and its temporal bouffant.
We followed the nape under that hairdo as if it were our guru,
and no culture revolutionized us.
We were red and immune, a romance of burlap.
The fortune cookies unfurled FAKERS: Today
you will know what it is to be long-suffering
you’re Lucky numbers are from inside their peachy intestines.

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Dollhouse Dinner Bell

really works, calls in the townsfolk from the square—
the milkman, barber, dogcatcher, mayor—
to the church of molded meat-foods presented on tiny china plates.
Grace is god’s wife's name, and she makes the supper,
carrying it in, wiping her hands on her fluffy apron.
Everyone washes up and bows their heads,
and each head is so yellow or pink and round,
also made of china, also edible.
The electric lights blink Christmas and so on.
At the top of the house, in the attic to which no stairs lead,
the children lie flat on their backs next to
miniature rose-tipped cakes, miniature trikes,
their eyes staring mild, their clothing gone
from their soft cotton bodies, their painted-on bits of hand.
Down below, after the iced tea and radishes,
Grace cleans up, the soft white hymnals removed to the parlor.
It’s a swell town. There are no kids to tattle.
There are no fireworks but every day is the glorious fourth, in excelsis.
There are balls and parades and bandstands.
The house has a pine façade with gingerbread trim and no rear,
the walls blown out by the hurricane of Cool-Whip
that seared through long ago and smote all the cattle.

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