2 December 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 4
Doll-Farm
I would like to openly tell you what I saw
but 1) somewhere along the road I added two letters to my name,
and this makes me slightly unaccountable.
2) I am also known to propose dances that have only one or two movements in sum.
3) When playing Peter Pan I will insist on being Tiger Lily.
4) My night vision is poor even with corrective lenses.
All of these statements are true, but you can see I lack sincerity.
Let me instead build you a farm out of some foamcore—
I mean a doll-farm—and make chicken-dolls from acorns,
paint stones I collected to look like sheep.
We can gather popcorn for the eggs our hens lay and branches of pine for the trees.
It is not the best I can do.
I'm sure if I tried I could produce a line or two about Nature,
or reveal some near-religious sudden starry idea that a million people have had before,
but as I said, I am a person who added, for rather shoddy reason,
two extra letters to what used to be an upstanding, austere-ish name.
So let's just open this little matchbox drawer and take out berries to be apples
for the horses made of corks.
About the author:
Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given (Verse, 2002) and the chapbook Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). Her poems have been included the 2004 and 2005 editions of Best American Poetry and a number of other anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers (Sarabande, 2006), and she is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship. She is co-editor of three forthcoming feminist poetry projects: with Rachel Zucker, Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, an anthology of essays and poems (Iowa, 2008); with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque, a theory-driven poetry anthology (Saturnalia, 2009); and with Becca Klaver, an anthology of contemporary poetry on girlhood (Switchback, 2008). Greenberg also studies American subcultures and edited a college reader, Youth Subcultures: Exploring Underground America (Longman, 2006). She is the poetry editor for the journal Black Clock, a founder and co-editor of the journal Court Green, and is the founder-moderator of the poet-moms listserv. She is an Assistant Professor in the poetry program at Columbia College Chicago and lives in Evanston, IL with her family.
For further reading:
See the complete list of work by Arielle Greenberg at 42opus. Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 7, No. 4, where "Doll-Farm" ran on December 2, 2007. List other work with these same labels: poetry.
