Featured Poet: Simone Muench

the ferment

(starring jesse m)

Fever-lit and gin-livid, she says, wring the nightshade from my eyes. Let me be an explosion. Thorned and hooved, slipping in swampwater in a brackish March gone mad, in a shuttered house against a backdrop of fox bones and lace chemises spread across the lawn. Bullet something for biting as midnight visits with waterlogged lungs and bird carcasses. The swamp tests the distance when entire dialects go missing. I am floats by, dangling in a line of light bulbs while wisteria shapes the atmosphere; stanzas etched into lavender soap and peaches she’d wrap in gauze. A seed to let the body speak. One mason jar, one wineglass, a murder and a verb. The beat of unsettle in her song.

the elliptic mirror

(starring lina v)

At the far side of barely, there is no reaching her mouth, her parabolic ear. She is an undertow of linen with a lakeside cadence. When the doctor diagnosed blindness, she heard rain, and from thenceforth the world was wet. The sky plump with milk and lunation. Moving between gardenia beam and umbra, her face upturns. Radiates silver convexity. Her eyes ever apogee, not apology.

the matryoshka

(starring hadara b)

Sunlight buzzes your windows into being as you crack a kaleidoscope in half, searching for a photograph of your mother before disease splits her face into reflection and recollection. When you slide to the floor, your dress spreads volcanic; an orange silk corona framing the hands’ flawless architecture, the fire-station in your stomach. An invisible fretwork of sutures keeps you intact though you are known to leak milkglass and bandages inscribed with epigraphs.

Above, the sun falls feather-slow into the sea; familial passage from flame to salt water. Your eyes limned in a black forest; nerve cells spinning their way into the emptiness that holds half your body, while your mother calls daughter with a seagrass sad languor, settling into the somatic bed you’ve carved out for her; a nesting doll, her face behind your face, safeguarded. Humming you into your own existence.

These poems are from Simone Muench's forthcoming book Orange Crush (February 2010, Sarabande Books).

Copyright © 2009 Simone Muench