“Boxcar” by Arielle Greenberg
Fall 2007, Volume 31, Number 2
You’ve got that shiny boxcar
painted Rage-on-Wheels in fire letters on the side
& you’ve been driving for years
& you zip through town on just your own
heidy-ho and I’ll tear you down.
You carjack me and carjack my sister,
carjack my baby sister and my baby girl
& drag us around by the long brown hair
shot with gold that we got from you,
heidy-ho, toodle-oo, names spelt out in fire.
No engine, no motor,
just a little boxcar jacked to the hilt
& its speedy missus, shooting off gold
from the crowns in our teeth, jaws cocked wide
as we’re dragged around, heidy-ho, years on end, end in flame.
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.