Simone Muench: Five Poems

A Sequence of Poems from the Orange Girl Series

She slipped out of the Moorish gate and into the orange grove

On days when the air is sea-
water taffy and all glittering

surfaces are coated in kerosene,
one refrains from saying "bedclothes"

for fear of causing hospitals
and courthouses to flame,

a proliferating scarlet
that cannot be contained.

Summer and sentences trickle
down our backs as we gather

driftwood from the river
to build a house that cannot hold us.

Like riddles and diseases we are
a multiplying sigh. We are fevered

with fervor and red liqueur. The wax
of sealed envelopes. The fact is

we disappear as departing footsteps,
orange girls blazing through doors

of sugarwater and fire.

Where there's bush orange, there's a fault line, and where there's a fault line, there's water

A woman knows clementines,
emergency. How crepe myrtle

blossoms stick to a wet face,
a baseball bat shatters the patella.

Cities fire their lights up at night
in some semblance of protection

against the oily darkness, against
bodies water-logged in the bay.

Disease of a body syntactically
disarranged. Limbs and hair

webbed with algae. A woman's
black dress shadow-spread

across water. A dress
designated for dance, thin

as cocktail napkins. Her
own skin gathering the Baltic's

debris, an intersection of earrings
and quiet, wrists and ropes.

Somewhere in the pitch is a song, but
the current's so strong only the drowned

can decipher it.

The orange had been squeezed, and the rind thrown to rot in the highway

Smell of cash and mouthwash
complete the stunted summer day.
So does a maggot in a wound.

Devouring. Are you a highway robber
or a housewife? Do you dream
of beetles or green snakes, rare
steak or heirloom tomatoes?

Everything is monstrous today. Hot
blossoms in the night. Wood or wound.

Knives desire and humidity dissolves
clothes off neighbors
who know something is not quite right

but close their curtains and blur
odd sounds with oldies and air-conditioning.

Next door a man is staring at a body.
Next door a man is carving a body

while his neighbors smile,
offer bourbon on the back porch
where July is hot with sand and orange
compote, sweetness of something sinister.

At each end of the table, a marmalade gelatin mermaid bathed in a brass basin of orange-flower water

No one can be reached
in this city of correct syntax

where water deposits its marginalia.
This city of aqueducts and evening gowns

sweeping the cobblestones. A girl
dragged along the waterfront,

dropped in a dumpster wearing
a yellow shawl and pearl earrings,

her hair once smelling of pears
and held by tortoiseshell, now covered

in banana spiders, oily eggshells.
This city closes its windows to the odor

and forgets that a girl went missing,
forgets any girl who "got herself strangled."

The canal said body. The body said murder.
Murder said get me a witness while I wait

for soft-armed girls carrying fruit and soup
to their sick mothers. This city is thick

with cold cases and ripped pantyhose,
ligature marks and headlines blaming women

for wearing short skirts after dark.

An orange a day keeps the doctor away

Fever-damaged girls
light up in a row. Spells
and vixens and dead calico kittens.
The convent said fire. The fire
said kindness. Kindness
took a victim. Bone
bonnets for the little girls
sleeping, and blue
beds for their snapped
necks. A kiss is a bite
is a bit. Slit in the clouds
above a slit throat. A black
coat and a black glove
went missing.

*

One girl was fallen
in cold golden light. Girl
was killed by frost, a man's
hand on her starched
white collar, undone and
saturated with woodburn
while snow descended
like laudanum.

*

Doctor, come quick, the little girls
are sick, their voices muffled
by smoke and wool,
hands and psalms.

Hurry, hurry, it's the eclipse,
the girls aren't breathing
and the chapel is leaking.

Doctor, come quick,
someone's a heretic        someone's a witch.

Poet's Biography:

Simone Muench's first book The Air Lost in Breathing won the Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry (Helicon Nine, 2000). Her second, Lampblack & Ash, received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry (Sarabande Books, 2005), and was one of the editor's selections in the New York Times Book Review. She has poems forthcoming or published in Iowa Review, Poetry, American Poet, Caffeine Destiny and others. She received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is currently an assistant professor at Lewis University. She is also a contributing editor to Sharkforum where she presents a "poem of the week" series, as well as being an avid horror film fan. You can visit her website at http://www.simonemuench.com.