Simone Muench
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: Our first cowritten poem for the miCRo series hails from two authors who are no strangers to pairing up on the page. As part of the editorial team behind They Said, a recently released multigenre anthology of contemporary collaborative writing that’s creating a stir in the literary world, Simone Muench and Jackie K. White have joined sensibilities again to bring us “Portrait as Landscape: Not the Fox.”
Jackie K. White
In their haunting sonnet about the elusive nature of identity, we encounter a figure who longs to escape the myths of girlhood that threaten her autonomy. Muench and White adeptly merge their voices to create a universe full of echoes, half-echoes, dualities and near-dualities, an imagistic soundscape in which girl-as-dead-fox can become girl as anything she desires—buzzard, boat’s bow, blue glint—while the rest of the world carries on with its “carrion.”
To hear Simone and Jackie read “Portrait as Landscape: Not the Fox,” click below:
Portrait as Landscape: Not the Fox
She was wronged, flung from childhood into a vista of fox bones and forest moss. Was she blue aura or gold ore—a myth of the river, a silhouette in the mirror? She was thronged by norm-chatter and dank hisses, others’ wishes warping her girlhood with crushes and carrion. Could she un- shadow, resmelt a core, smudge their glass? She is tired of being frame and folly. She wants to be the buzzard, not the dead fox, the boat’s bow cutting a path through fast water, the blue glint of the scythe singing prairie free, herself the tall grass and the stillness that knows its own pond-depth, its sediment sure.
Simone Muench has authored six full-length books including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her most recent, Suture (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), is a collection of sonnets written with Dean Rader. She also edited They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She serves as a poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly.
Jackie K. White is a professor at Lewis University and assistant faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review. Recent poems appear in Tupelo Quarterly and superstitionreview.com, along with collaborative centos in Isthmus. She has also published three chapbooks and served as an assistant editor for the collaborative anthology They Said.
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