SELF-PORTRAIT LINED BY ELSE LASKER-SCHULER,
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You blaze around all blossoms like a black spell, you bruise the house with bad news deboning walls into a buckling, uprooting anthills and doorframes. Even the bunkers collapse. No balm, no salve. This is the cycle of spoil and rubble. The era of spittle and gauze. From heirloom to urn, you tether your sorrow. Amid insects and tornadoes, you play the jinx, slinking around like a snake-oil saboteur. Because screens drop, because sinkholes unmask footing, ash marks your dismembering as you shoot from slither to slogan. When you weaken, you're like an unwanted arm around a woman's waist. A drop cloth. A stuck doll. |
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.
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.