Simone Muench
Cornflowers fringe the river like lashes.
I am lonely, you concede. Leaves
adhere to your back in mottled tongues;
air articulates your face with odor of roasted
apples, evening’s end. In second-story windows,
girls in fine coal dresses undress, scrim of their slips
lemon light: thin as a bone-button that unfastens
the sky. Blue door on a black house, your body
like glass: a pitcher of violets, twilight, a blue fruit
abandoned. An ice skate floats by on the river’s ear.
Do you hear the current’s assembly: a comb,
a greenfinch, plastic lids, an index finger, a fishing
lure, a mirror fragment containing the tumult of water
and bodies. Listen to the river’s hiss; metal swallows
clip the air. Hunters in bright orange vests
approach you as though you were a ghost deer.
Simone Muench is an associate editor for ACM (Another Chicago Magazine). She was raised in Benson, Louisiana, and the Ozark Mountains in Combs, Arkansas, before moving to Colorado to receive her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Colorado. Her poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in Paris Review, Pleiades, Phoebe, Indiana Review, Notre Dame Review and others. The Air Lost in Breathing, her first book, was the recipient of the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry and was published by Helicon Nine Editions in 2000. Her most recent collection, Lampblack and Ash, won the Katherine Morton Prize from Sarabande Books and was published in 2005. She teaches at Lewis University.