4 December 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 4
No Wonder
You can't be homeless in Minneapolis. It's too cold.
I mean, here you are, and you are cold and homeless in Minneapolis
but you're like my twin sister
and it's like Christmas:
glass balls of impossible
splintering all the trees.
What if you were three mad sisters
who lived at home with your mother
who hates you? Oh, you are?
Well, then, no wonder you are pregnant
and homeless on the streets of Minneapolis
with your cold glass globe containing the Mysteries.
The same thing happened to me, and I work so hard
to make sure I never went to that attic.
The holidays come closer every year with their lying.
They've put sand on the streets to cut the ice and snow.
But listen, sand won't save you.
Sand can't sympathize.
If I was like your twin sister
I'd carry you in something breakable and so cold
which is to say I'd betray you with the fakey-fake truth
like I've done all winter.
You with your little sign.
Me with my ornamental sorrow.
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 "No Wonder" ran on December 4, 2007. List other work with these same labels: poetry.
