I used to wear an autumn face and drape
myself in taupes, in grays. I was leaf shriveled,
water-logged, the open mouth of a vase
gone murky, its shatter and strew. I used
to swear a frayed array of sadnesses
in several slangs that everyone ignored
until a snow squall caught one syllable—
timbred with a spell, a prayer, a curse?—
that shot me to a center, whole, sun-flared
and spinning loose from that pinned darkness.
No longer echo or contour, but full-throated,
spring-fresh unfolded in every budding hue.
No longer fractured or lax, but limb sure
and language? Lush, languid, lean and heard.
Simone Muench is the author of six full-length books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014) and Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010). Her recent, Suture, includes sonnets written with Dean Rader (Black Lawrence, 2017). She is an editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence, 2018) and creator of the HB Sunday Reading Series in Chicago. Additionally, she serves as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review and as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly.
Jackie K. White is a professor at Lewis University and a faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. She was just named the 2019 winner of the Reid H. Montgomery Distinguished Service Award by the CMA. Recent poems appear in Tupelo Quarterly, along with collaborative poems published or forthcoming in Pleiades, The Journal, Isthmus, Posit, Bennington Review, Hypertext Review, and Cincinnati Review. She has published three chapbooks, and served as an assistant editor for the collaborative anthology, They Said.