PURCHASE

"Simone’s poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling. The language is refreshing, musical, attenuated. The literary, cultural references wake us up. This seems a writer inspired by Other. . . . There is an evocative marriage taking place here. Her poems display a highly engaged imagination."
—Anne Waldman

"Lush, sprouting sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Simone Muench’s poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty."
—James Tate

By Your Mouth

At night I sleep with the saddest men

but today I ache, moths and blood
decorating my bed, a conjuring

trick I shrink
my spine into. My wrists

raw wool and black
as malpractice from your bite.

Today, not even a meteor swarm
can alarm me.

My hands bare the bad lands,
molded riot of Texas

purple spike. Debut of the mad
muse—how like spies it is disguised.

Outdoors, the wars roar on and
the dead are gathered

like promissory notes and buried
in their grandmothers’ mink coats.

—

You salute with a broken tooth, words
tapering off, vapor lifting out your eyes,
no longer knowing the difference between
photographs and mirrors. Shadows border
lips, the severe sheerness of your existence.
Call in the maintenance staff for your removal.
You’re a groove in my lineage, a greasy spoon
where I consumed eggs overeasy. The sun’s
just a rerun. I’d come to your funeral
if I were in a better mood, but my head jerks
with a thousand whipsnakes. When you died,
I swooned like a flamenco dancer on Acapulco
gold while honey guides and vinegar flies gathered
near your stain, small as bird shadow, on the snow.

—

Days when I gaze into your glass
eye, archeological remains

of your tortured back, mustangs
gather at your open mouth.

You conspire against my pleasure,
your sadness is ferocious, taller

than Kilimanjaro. You live in my ribs,
a ruby boutonnière; you are plum

and pendulum; a car salesman in white
tie and tails. You’re bizarre as innards,

buzzards as you stumble dream
to dream you reside in margins,

in the blurry vision of virgins;
in my eyes, you are aniline dye,

the deep south of your contagious mouth.

Viewing Rain from a Hospital Bed
after Levertov

Something sidles
up to me in the dark, I

taste it; this disease
I can’t speak.

I listen to rain, tangled
branches, scar on my chest.

It shoots. You
lick it.

How is it? Don’t go
where you don’t belong.

It’s how you hear it—
scar, emblem of chance,

unnamable odor
pearling out of it

and over you,
stifling you in bed.

But what if
like an axolotl, its

quickness I visit,
and slip coiling into light?

Not scar, not
that voice

of ache and tomorrow; or bone
crack for having moved too fast.

What if held beneath sea
it turned a beautiful

blue, an impenetrable
blue? Could all that liquid

be the source of fall?
Here beneath flesh: is an I

with diamond bones, some
split in rot, others

rain sparks, sage
blooming additions. Here it ends—

could I erase
in lampblack rain,

the moon flickering?