Simone Muench & Jackie K. White

Portrait as Landscape: Of grisly, of lovely

A girl is both tiara and shadow,
a boarded-up window, a wooded ravine.
Neither scar or slit, but a garnet
of grisly, of lovely, of lonely,

plumbed and deeply plumbing shine.
A girl is also substance and pluck,
a crowbar, a prying, and a peering into
the ugly, the empty, silt and stone.

Less paper doll, more shadow shifter, full
of foghorn and ghost glitter. Petal-
precious and profane, a canted frame.

Less pinwheel princess, more moat-leap, mock
curtsy and scissor kick. This girl is lovely door-
down, lonely hill climbed, grizzly untamed.

Simone Muench is the author of six books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her recent, Suture, includes sonnets written with Dean Rader (BLP, 2017). She is an editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (BLP, 2018) and curator 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 Pleiades, Isthmus, Posit, and Cincinnati Review. She has published three chapbooks and served as an assistant editor for the collaborative anthology, They Said.