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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arielle Greenberg
Arielle Greenberg

Arielle Greenberg is the author of Given (Verse, 2002), which was also her MFA thesis at Syracuse University. Her work has recently been featured in Best American Poetry 2004 and Conjunctions, and she serves as an editor for the literary magazines Black Clock and Court Green. She is the assistant director of and teaches in the MFA and undergraduate poetry programs at Columbia College Chicago.

FURTHER READING
Essays by Arielle Greenberg
A (Slightly Qualified) Defense of MFA Programs: Six Benefits of Graduate School
Poems About Birth and Parenting
A Woman Waits for Me
by Walt Whitman
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
by Galway Kinnell
Central Park, Carousel
by Meena Alexander
Curriculum Vitae
by Lisel Mueller
Daughter-Mother-Maya-Seeta
by Reetika Vazirani
Gods
by Michael Redhill
Infant Joy
by William Blake
Morning Song
by Sylvia Plath
The Mother
by Gwendolyn Brooks
The Sick Child
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Tract
by William Carlos Williams
You Begin
by Margaret Atwood
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Honey  
by Arielle Greenberg

I am three months out and six to go,
stuffing my plastic Superball body with the salt
& twang of crackers die-cut into the shapes of fish.
God forsakes me when I forsake him
but mostly he’s much kinder, as is his duty:
I am radiant, people tell me, and have no hives,
except the swarm of gold bombs biting its way
into my sticky hollow.  And I don’t mean sex.  
I am just a menagerie for bright orange creatures.  
Even my dreams are godless (and full 
of God): I dream I am guided
by an elderly couple in a dim farmhouse
to their morning radio and blackberry tea
and then given the combs which I snap
into my dry mouth where they fill and fill.
Never, upon awaking, have I been so empty
and wanted more a cracker.  Never so
suffused with the weekly, with time
as another god passing through the many perfect
crypts and ambers I house beneath my skin.



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Copyright © Arielle Greenberg. Used with permission of the author.
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