When sickness comes, when disease, when
a dirty house in a gutted world finds us deserted,
our bodies deflated narratives, our voices re-pitched,
we turn to libraries to fling our stalled frames forward
into covers, into jackets, into comfort and into solid,
but there’s no fit, and the story can’t be rewritten.
When we feel it breathing there—this illness, this odd
other, both bookmark and bridle—churning its sourness
through our lungs, whose words, what spell can
we exhale? What language-medicine could expel
this hex hovering in our flesh, this foul insertion
in our cellular record? Here’s a missive to our harm,
a written reminder that we will refurbish what’s been
dented or dimmed: Dear body-bruised, we will breathe in
our brokenness, fill in the cracks with gold, with the pale
light that each upon the other throws.
Simone Muench is the author of six full-length books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014) and Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010). Her recent, Suture, includes sonnets written with Dean Rader (Black Lawrence, 2017). She is an editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence, 2018) and creator of the HB Sunday Reading Series in Chicago. Additionally, she serves as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review and as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly.
Jackie K. White is a professor at Lewis University and a faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. She was just named the 2019 winner of the Reid H. Montgomery Distinguished Service Award by the CMA. Recent poems appear in Tupelo Quarterly, along with collaborative poems published or forthcoming in Pleiades, The Journal, Isthmus, Posit, Bennington Review, Hypertext Review, and Cincinnati Review. She has published three chapbooks, and served as an assistant editor for the collaborative anthology, They Said.
