Loss enters stage left in the form of violins
thrumming the past into forecast: mulberries
in the backyard, first time, a cushioned mess
of mauve stain, caress and bruise, then forgivings.
Loss is a severed finger sent spinning
into the lake, the sun magnifying
a ring’s opal fire and its milky insistence
that we break everything we love, the way
I broke apart the carnation corsage,
the way you broke my bargaining lips
on the belt buckle gift. A guitar meant
for crooning becomes a life untuned,
a molded fruit. We can’t recast ruin.
We have to sit in the taint. Survive it.
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.