Self-Portrait as a Line from an Emily Dickinson Poem by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White

I measure every Grief I meet
as if I could tether it, tune it,
fair weather it—successor
to loss, where cobweb
& feather are sewn together,

where barb & bramble tattoo
untruths to the wound’s
memory of a body gone. Debt
hisses like a mocking breeze
through spring with its unsaid

bridle. You can try to bracket it,
ration it, ladle it as though a briny
broth of stinging nettle &
crushed bees. No matter. It’s venom’s
slow dive, a rockbound flight

we can’t ever name. They were wrong
about the ephemeral: it dilates
within, makes us vagrants, scavenging
debris, hungry, & sheltering in dead
leaves, in the warm mulch the dead leave.

Simone Muench is the author of several books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). 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 a faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review and as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly.

Jackie K. White is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Come clearing (Dancing Girl), and an assistant editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence). Recent collaborations, poems, and translations appear in Posit, Tupelo Quarterly, and Natural Bridge. She is a professor of English Studies at Lewis University where she helps to advise the Jet Fuel Review.