8th Annual Juried Reading
Second Place Poet
Simone Muench

Simone Muench is the assistant editor of ACM. Poems are published or appearing in Paris Review, Phoebe, Pleiades, Indiana Review etc. She recently received the Charles Goodnow Award for Poetry. Her book The Air Lost in Breathing won the 1999 Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry and was published by Helicon Nine Editions last Fall. She is currently working on her Ph.D at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

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

il y a des loups qui s'assoient aux pieds de l'homme

there are lakes that spin rain into constellations
highways that switch into rivers
gamblers who trade organs for gold

there are fiddles that can kill you
carving their song la cienaga into arms
until it's a flesh-yelling circle

of loup-garous and you
perched like a comma in the middle
of a sentence, circumscribed but alive

the word is a broken door
where light slips through like indium,
scattering the thousand prisms of self

there are cicadas that decay into lace,
indian burns from girls in third grade
whose crushes translate to sugar and ice

imbalance of sentimentality

you're less lovely in the light
but lovelier than last night when you
heaved over the side of a yacht

into your own moon-mad reflection
as frost formed on the sea,
and fish slipped through

ice cracks: mercury-lit filaments

listen to the fricative sigh
of fingers through tresses,
over peaches that glow

like low-watt bulbs
and locate the different hues
of blue in your lampblack hair

there are wrinkles like
scrawls of a suicide note,
infinite rose slopes

of snow, a gaze through violet
haze of leaf smoke as the swallow
leaves its shadow

in melted tallow a grey smear,
imprint of bird feet, impossible feat
of flying through resin

wings fling open evening, amber-
stained, stars hung over the sea like letters
of your name which is invisible

except on the liminal highways
of a woman's thighs and
the snake eyes of battered dice

--Simone Muench

(C) 2002 The Poetry Center of Chicago
All Rights Revert Back to the Author Upon Publication.
No Portion of this poem may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author.