Simone Muench

Bird’s Eye View

In a jar overflowing

with Atlas moths, the smell

of breastmilk & swampwater

overtakes the instrument of an eye:

In a world sketched on a wing,

there was silverware & automata,

a boy drowning

in a vat of molasses,

there was a pair of red satin

shoes tacked to a mannequin,

Dali’s ocelot taxidermied

& strung up in a freight elevator.

You didn’t believe that my periphery

held more than dioramas, more

than Tennessee.  Nectarines.

You were always drowning

& I was always breathing your lungs

into being.  But seeing was for the eagles,

something beyond  trees, something

beyond this cyclorama of we.  All those

unbuttoned blouses, falling leaves.

the portrait (starring kimberly l)

a girl leans across a counter in iowa, edges of her hair flaring neon. she is a verb written on a cardboard marquis. aluminum moon, savior of nightjars. her scar a red glass cardinal. where did the country take her sun-tipped bangs? her girlhood negations to the sweet diminishing of sunday school hymns? our lady of the unsaluted past. lady of cornhusks & sericulture, arrowheads & fruit bats. smelling of upholstery, she falls bird-winged into intramuscular structures, a diagram of sutures beneath an inaudible mouth. language. cleavage. bondage. the secret frequencies of fingers. the black hiss of asphyxiation.  what is this equation prickling through her like chicory, this architecture of insinuations? beneath the glass she moves, her frame made strange, goldleafed and dangerously askew.

 Simone Muench's’second book Lampblack & Ash won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize (Sarabande, 2005).  Her recent chapbooks are Orange Girl  (dancing girl press, 2007) and Sonoluminescence (with Bill Allegrezza, Dusie Press, 2007). She is an editor for Sharkforum.