CINDERED CHILL OF INTRICATE BLUE DREAMS,
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a cento
No person, however safe in life, escapes darkness rushing on with waves with fever like the thin but inevitable glass between when the sun slips and the light goes, faltering like a flute breaking. The cindered chill of intricate blue dreams in the high reeds behind this world commands the travelers to halt, passion floats away. Bile is vaporized. As blue petals sail upon an ocean of lifting fog, this dreadful century staggers to its close. The contraries are not easy to reconcile, but things will work out, people said. Nothing gives and nothing holds loosely and the garden burns in pearl and jasper that glitter in the serried dark. Who passed by, without our knowing?-- Their breath like a tree’s breath. Their silence like a translucent mirror. In the honeycomb of light they step forward to be counted. The step off into emptiness is the last step. |
Simone Muench is the author of several books including Orange Crush (Sarabande), Wolf Centos (Sarabande), and Suture (Black Lawrence), a sonnet collection written with Dean Rader. Most recently, she co-edited They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence). A recipient of an NEA poetry fellowship and a Meier Foundation for the Arts Award, she is a professor at Lewis University where she serves as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. She is also a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly and creator of the HB Sunday Reading Series.
Jackie K. White is a professor at Lewis University and a faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Recent poems appear in Tupelo Quarterly and Superstition Review along with collaborative poems published or forthcoming in Pleiades, The Los Angeles Review, The Journal, Bennington Review, Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, and others. She has published several chapbooks and served as an assistant editor for the collaborative anthology, They Said. Her collaborative chapbook, Hex & Howl, co-written with Simone Muench, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, 2021.
[Lines and fragments taken from Laila al-Akhyaliyya, Sachiko Yoshika, Takako U. Lento, H.D., Rupert Brooke, Lynda Hull, Thomas James, Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs, Betti Alver, J. V. Foix, Carolyn Kizer, Gottfried Benn, Cecil Bodker, Martina Werner, Anna Akhmatova, Yves Bonnefoy, Jean Valentine, Coral Bracho, Meena Alexander, Ingeborg Bachmann]
Jackie K. White is a professor at Lewis University and a faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Recent poems appear in Tupelo Quarterly and Superstition Review along with collaborative poems published or forthcoming in Pleiades, The Los Angeles Review, The Journal, Bennington Review, Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, and others. She has published several chapbooks and served as an assistant editor for the collaborative anthology, They Said. Her collaborative chapbook, Hex & Howl, co-written with Simone Muench, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, 2021.
[Lines and fragments taken from Laila al-Akhyaliyya, Sachiko Yoshika, Takako U. Lento, H.D., Rupert Brooke, Lynda Hull, Thomas James, Else Lasker-Schüler, Nelly Sachs, Betti Alver, J. V. Foix, Carolyn Kizer, Gottfried Benn, Cecil Bodker, Martina Werner, Anna Akhmatova, Yves Bonnefoy, Jean Valentine, Coral Bracho, Meena Alexander, Ingeborg Bachmann]