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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

Featured Poets: William Allegrezza and Simone Muench

A Villanelle 

I have undone our bent decision laughing sadly 
between wind and wound, the day pitches down.
We are a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

with hoes, tropes, and our mass machinery
with licensed language but without listening we drone.
I have undone our bent decision laughing sadly 

as though to speck electric and forgo our power medley
we divine to be verbs but end up as proper nouns.
We are a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

trying through the days’ languor to talk avidly
of words settling among sheets slipped facedown,
the stillness undone, our bent decision laughing sadly.

An embryonic engineering; an abracadabra of absently
searching the haphazard circuitry of words.  Yes, this brown
field is a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

a discord of clouds at our throats, a soured creamery
left hastily for the rush of law, of light, of renown.
Still moving with our bent decision laughing sadly, 
we replicate settings devoid of greenery.






she

she enter it  she affair it she apprehend it she après ski it
she having known it      is beyond       into being    light
into listlessness of she  listen in as she whittles  & splits
overheard the stifling voices   she  shatter  she writ of right

she save us from the undertown of the Pontchartrain
with bone   she ravage   react   ah, sweet throaty open   
river corridors, fill us up with your considerate champagne
spilling open the meniscus   over streets   into   she ocean   

she devoted    she reignites     in doing so,  burns the scrim
the dancers scattering beyond the sparks          she panthers  
into uninhabitable dimness       she shimmies her phantom limb
as cloud,   climb    to state   unto this    she matters

she alphabetizes        she vanishes in acts of three
burning the smoke tree  sea   she instant  she  the will to be

          





©2009 William Allegrezza and Simone Muench