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THREE POEMS
by Arielle Greenberg


Bedtime
for Monica Ferrell

Phantom coryphée, how gone-around the fiction,
an insect fashioned from slenderest darning needles
who caught herself between two screens,
the way three atoms charge towards one anthem
and it becomes a subtracted honorific: a family.
Similar to a family.

Step down with me, into this blind room,
its dug-long earthen education.
Our cousin, rocked by hypertension, found her little lumpy bed
under the eaves and fell to flutes:
not a necessary arthropod, she was a dancer.
Had been known to dance.

She slept then, as we sleep now, enlaced between two screens,
and this is daytime, and this is night,
and in the other, ghosts took her head for a filling station
and siphoned the petroleum there, turning it to jelly.
Aroused she was one decimal point
away from herself. A tenth
that made all the difference.

This is close by a family,
an unhinged cabinet of counselors, queuing up
to be told how to sell their bedrooms
to the dead. Spectral the fractions
of the saga. Do you believe, and stay longer
at your meal-plate with its small, late fruits,
or do you dare to lay down
out in your pod of relative music?



Father's Day

I know it sounds "quirky" to say it, or "preposterous," or I seem like I'm trying to be "abstract" instead of "living in the now," but "time," which used to be a "big idea" to me and is to most people, I suspect, something you "could count on," has recently changed into "a horse of a different color." The color is sort of lavender-gray, and the horse is small--after lunch, for instance, I bathed it in a teacup. It was dirty from the egg salad sandwich. Also, time "sheds." Do most horses do that? Maybe it would be better to say it "molts," because it left a delicate cast, a "tube" of skin if you will, the texture of that crinkly clear wrapping paper and a "metallic" black. My sister made a dress out of it. We call it the "time dress." She put it in her portfolio--she's trying to get into "art school" to get an "MFA" and used the dress as her "project." She used to want to be a pastry chef but she doesn't like "long hours." That's another thing about time--it feels "shorter" now. I tried to ride it into town, and had to "get off" because my knees "scraped the ground." Instead, I put time carefully on my shoulder and that seemed "hunky-dory." It needed to go to the post office for stamps and so did I. It was almost "Father's Day." Or at least, we assumed it was, from looking at the sun. Time itself has gotten so unreliable.



High-Rise Astronomy

A city's lust may be veiled by cavalier building,
but some high-rise wants to tip, be intimate.

Beyond the black-clad particles, citizens are still
a folly of stars, each a planet, and on each, at least
two lovers enacting psalms every second.
On the right night, after a blackout or minor apocalypse,
you can see the brightest ones coming together,
Jupiter slipping behind Mars in a shower of je t'adore.

Get out the best binoculars from the hall's only closet-
in each window across the way there's no insomniac story,
no, but a rumba of the spirit, a St. Vitus dance.

Light-years away, you've got a raw hot something
in the archway of your pants: it's empathy.
You are in love with a city.

The sheets of other planets look so soft-
they've been watched a million times,
the way they shoot across the sky, like a wish.