Swallow for Saturday

By Arielle Greenberg

, the day of Phobias.

Children born on this day will be ugly & die.

You say three years can swallow one moment of a mother

throwing herself against a wall.

I don’t know. I have my doubts,

my phobias, which include a moment

of a father with a clothes hanger held around his neck, & shaking.

Why take an ad out in a nation where there are white power marches?

Why bother with any country at all?

I’ve developed a newspaper phobia, a mother phobia,

which means I am scaring myself to death.

Arielle Greenberg is co-author of Home/Birth: A Poemic, author of My Kafka Century, Given, and co-editor of three anthologies, including Gurlesque. She lives in Maine and teaches out of her home, in the Maine community, and in the Oregon State University-Cascades low residency MFA. She also writes a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review.