Her armless arms, her hairless head,
lost doll feathering through duckweed,
porcelain skull lighting the shallow pond
like those eels, like eroding corals, so
much loss always, and I, too, adrift—
a word on the verge of extinction,
a boat going down in the harbor, an item
on a list undone. We are pieces hung
upside down like cows in meat
coolers, divested of our tongues
and their coarse pronouncements,
their search for a final satiating flavor.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 6.
Simone Muench is the recipient of an NEA poetry fellowship and author of six full-length books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her chapbook, Hex & Howl, co-written with Jackie K. White, was published by BLP (2021), and she has recent collaborative work in APR, Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, and others.
Jackie K. White is the author of three previous chapbooks and the co-author, with Simone Muench, of Hex & Howl, Black Lawrence Press, 2021. A former professor of English at Lewis University, her poems, translations, and collaborative poems have appeared in such journals as Bayou, Third Coast, American Poetry Review, and Pleiades.
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