15 January 2007 | Vol. 6, No. 4
Excerpts from Greta
Chapter 11
A tiny, canopied bed,
Two slight sister girls,
Constant pecking,
There is something you are missing,
No it wasn't quite like that,
Mismatched hair tangled together on a pillow,
Not like that either,
Ten-years-old and eight-years-old, respectively,
Sour breath and other sordid details,
When sisters marry and conceive,
The child comes out a softhearted vamp.
Chapter 12
Outside nightingale waited. Wasn't patience
so much as practical. Little feet
like dinosaurs and nightingale was remembering
her own sister: no tongue,
no hands,
just a spread testament.
Chapter 13
Once peacocked,
everything flickers
on a hint
of pleasure.
Chapter 14
Greta dreamed a bird.
Woke and reached for the scissors.
Chapter 15
Dry horsehair ends
lay on the floor like straw;
Greta stuffed them into the foot
of an old stocking and used this
to rat her hair. Bouffant
will make magnificence
out of any old thing. Makes riveting
play of all movement. Creates
size where there once
was not.
Chapter 16
Somnambulant before anything else.
Chapter 17
Greta carried bits of her now severed
left them in a haunted heap beneath
certain poppies. Auburn scraps
of hair meant to worm their way
underground, feed something many-legged,
Intraterra.
Chapter 18
When situating one's home
it is vital to recall softness,
or the degree to which you meander
while sleeping. Knowing this (she
knew from sleep, believe her)
nightingale gathered Greta's lonely
bits, arranged them like a bouquet,
let somnambulant breeze drop by.
Chapter 19
Nightingale grew from the sky
up. Fed on intraterra legless things
and shit where she liked. At night
opened her breast like a gushing fruit
and fed reveries of love. Like most
birds, nightingale wanted one (love)
that she could crawl inside.
Other girlbirds looked at her snidely,
ripped at her raw chest,
wouldn't fit,
closed their own in return.
All this gore and nothing.
When nightingale looked on Greta
she saw some love sizeable enough
to enter.
About the author:
Gina Abelkop lives in New York, where she is an MFA candidate in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and edits the feminist literary journal Finery, published by Birds of Lace press. She has previously been published in Lodestar Quarterly, Stirring, DIAGRAM, Softblow, Wicked Alice, and Hothouse.
For further reading:
Browse the contents of 42opus Vol. 6, No. 4, where "Excerpts from Greta" ran on January 15, 2007. List other work with these same labels: poetry.