Simone Muench (Chicago, USA): Three Prose Poems
(an apiary): kristy o
Like aqua eyeliner and Baudelaire, we drink in strange trades, skålling over your chest of bees. What would you choose—red meat or Coco Chanel? gentle violence or violent tenderness? When salsa dancing with Keats’ alias we bloomed gold thighs, pink sadnesses. At your bedroom window, I lean out of refuge, into moth wings. Our black eyes, transparent sting. You said, hello, blank-eyed, zero in! Our home base, a distant cabana, an archipelago; our family secrets, a fenestra, honeycomb riddled by jimsonweed. Sad fictions born of red letter afflictions and the redivivus of arthritic cypress. The light gonged, confirming my senses were leaving me, and you became a foehn, whispering through veils of glamorous biblical women, loaded up on blossom.
(beetle-beauty): lauren l
Through fossils of grapefruit, your words full of climacteric Kafka sadness. Night moths rest in your carnelian desert. There I found your fire-tossed hair, your jade green horns, and bowed beauty-down. Your father left you a blanket by the mustard-colored wall between a cigar and a scream. The house lost beyond a pepper tree. The curtains, like carapaces, and a mad rushing descent as if to name—strange things narrated—an object that long, shedding its horizon, a Chalcosoma caucasus from the image of your frame.
(a train track): mary b
Train track flutter girl; coriander lips and ale during Prohibition. That empty mouth like a bottle on a man’s neck. Marabou soft, doe's muzzle on a pomegranate split open, ultraviolet. You might have to rid yourself of all boys, mostly rapscallions. How they feel under hands: red fish, big branches caught in your rain-rinsed hair, river tresses. For your thigh, a thread of nine carat bone. While the crossbuck sign danger-flashed its bells, citronella girls smoked Parliaments with a felon; your neckline, a kerosene swoon.
© Simone Muench 2007
Like aqua eyeliner and Baudelaire, we drink in strange trades, skålling over your chest of bees. What would you choose—red meat or Coco Chanel? gentle violence or violent tenderness? When salsa dancing with Keats’ alias we bloomed gold thighs, pink sadnesses. At your bedroom window, I lean out of refuge, into moth wings. Our black eyes, transparent sting. You said, hello, blank-eyed, zero in! Our home base, a distant cabana, an archipelago; our family secrets, a fenestra, honeycomb riddled by jimsonweed. Sad fictions born of red letter afflictions and the redivivus of arthritic cypress. The light gonged, confirming my senses were leaving me, and you became a foehn, whispering through veils of glamorous biblical women, loaded up on blossom.
(beetle-beauty): lauren l
Through fossils of grapefruit, your words full of climacteric Kafka sadness. Night moths rest in your carnelian desert. There I found your fire-tossed hair, your jade green horns, and bowed beauty-down. Your father left you a blanket by the mustard-colored wall between a cigar and a scream. The house lost beyond a pepper tree. The curtains, like carapaces, and a mad rushing descent as if to name—strange things narrated—an object that long, shedding its horizon, a Chalcosoma caucasus from the image of your frame.
(a train track): mary b
Train track flutter girl; coriander lips and ale during Prohibition. That empty mouth like a bottle on a man’s neck. Marabou soft, doe's muzzle on a pomegranate split open, ultraviolet. You might have to rid yourself of all boys, mostly rapscallions. How they feel under hands: red fish, big branches caught in your rain-rinsed hair, river tresses. For your thigh, a thread of nine carat bone. While the crossbuck sign danger-flashed its bells, citronella girls smoked Parliaments with a felon; your neckline, a kerosene swoon.
© Simone Muench 2007
