Society Road

Leads from the jailhouse to the superhighway

With corrections happening along the facility like a march

So that all day out are the people

Like black paper birds you don't touch.

They look tough enough.

The sign says Don't Stop.

Tolls. Not a bell,

But the price you pay for passing through.

And in a far-off war zone,

They do their annual dig to clean the path for water

Because it is water that keeps a nation alive.

Each male must do his part along this and other roads.

What if the family sends no boy or man to clean the tunnels?

What if the family has no boy or no man?

The end of society, where you don't stop:

It's a jailhouse males call homeland and it sits at the side of a road.

ARIELLE GREENBERG'S first book, Given, was published by Verse Press in 2002; these poems are from two new manuscripts. With Rachel Zucker, she is editing an anthology of American women's poetry that is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. She is a professor in the poetry program at Columbia College in Chicago.

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