"The affair began in the Heaven of the Suite of the Thirty Three "
The Dhammapada
I wondered about what she could have said
about the day Adoring with Flowers when she fell
from a nimba branch with her offering set out to tremble
power lines (check the one out on Ashland as you approach Clybourn from the south. It’s magnificent.) Not only are there more vines,the leaves on the ivy that has now made its way half-way up the ash tree outside my window are much bigger than I ever remember them being, when they merely slithered around on the ground lo these many years I’ve stared out that same window. They never even made it a few feet up the tree before. Now they are thirty feet up in the air. In fact, the Virginia Creeper is now duking it out with the ivy for the right to cover the entire north side of my building, and it has even deigned to crawl up the side of the hideous condominiums of a mere decade vintage to my south.
My lower back is a broadband disentegrating.
Some sporadic gesture of a last tic,
stiff and stuck in signals.
Such a range of frequencies
you can hear a small woman firing herself
inside a stove.
Good Friday, April 6th, 8 PM
Center Portion
2850 1/2 W. Fullerton Avenue
Chicago Illinois 60647
April 7, 2007 6:00 PM
57th Street Books
1301 East 57th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
773-684-1300
Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005), Given (Verse, 2002), and the chapbook Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). Current projects include co-editing, with Rachel Zucker, an anthology of essays on women poets and mentorship. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Best American Poetry 2004 and 2005, Legitimate Danger: American Poets of the New Century, and Isn't It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger American Poets and in journals including Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, and APR. She teaches at Columbia College Chicago where she is a co-editor of the poetry journal Court Green.
