Featured Poem: “Pressed” by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White

 

 

PRESSED

 

 

Simone Muench and Jackie K. White

 

 

On a sheetless mattress, immobile and

undone, I was marked for ruin. I drowned

in dread, became a stain, a container

of shatter, of “I don’t matter.” I’m told to

 

muzzle that memory with pillow plush,

and smother all the old mouths’ carping

as I’m pressed into performance, pushed to play

that old game perfectly. Now, I turn the mouth

 

into spewing glass. The anatomy of a rupture.

I burn. I bellow. I say no I say no I say no.

This is the season of the scalpel, not nostalgia

This is the year of scraping out hauntings.

 

I said no. Now I shove that ghost into the fold, 

press back, iron the sheets of my choosing.

 

 

 

 

---

---

Simone Muench is the author of six full-length books including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her recent, Suture, was co-written with Dean Rader (BLP, 2017). She is an editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (BLP, 2018) and founder of the HB Sunday Reading Series in Chicago. Additionally, she serves as chief 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. Recent poems appear in Tupelo Quarterly and Superstition Review along with collaborative poems published or forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, The Journal, Bennington Review, Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, Posit, and others. She has published three chapbooks and served as an assistant editor for the collaborative anthology, They Said.

Follow them on social media!

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/simone.muench

https://www.facebook.com/jackie.white.378537

INSTAGRAM: @simonemuenchie

TWITTER: @hb_sundayseries