Tuesday Mar 19

FGE - Poetry October 2009

Alex Lemon - Poetry

AlexLemon Alex Lemon is the author of Mosquito (Tin House Books), Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions), Fancy Beasts (Milkweed Editions), and Happy: A Memoir (Scribner).

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Philip Jenks, Simone Muench - Poetry

Philip-Jenks Philip Jenks published two volumes of poetry, On the Cave You Live In(Flood Editions, 2002) and My First Painting will be “The Accuser” (Zephyr Press, 2005). He gratefully collaborates with Simone Muench. Their poems have appeared in a range of journals and in the chapbook Little Visceral Carnival (Cinematheque Press, 2009). He also collaborated with Sasha Miljevic, publishing Distance, an ekphrastic hybrid of prose and poetry (Dutch Art Institute, 2009). He recently completed his third manuscript, Colony Collapse. Last year, his poems appeared in the first Chicago snow, but they blew away.
 
  Simone-Muench.jpg Simone Muench’s third book Orange Crush will be published by Sarabande, 2010. Cinematheque Press published her collaborative chapbook Little Visceral Carnival written with Philip Jenks. She is a professor, vegetarian, horror film fan and editor of Sharkforum.
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 Dear Victorian Beauty—
 
 
You are a filament of history—gothic fragment,
narcissus booty—
I dare not touch
your nightshade eyes
but burn for being.
 
Spurned: strap me
in your harnesses
that I may not resist
the raven lace of your silhouette;
rum & rosewater of unfurling hair
 
swings over me. I’m cataleptic
in your presence, a drunk
present under aging halls.                                 
Billowing denial                         of sexual activity
held at bay by whalebone corset. 
Bustle-smothered lover.
 
Search your paramour for what whipped
yearning, your sternum humming
its bright bee garden.
 
Breath pollinates a population
repressed & etched
into animalism
then with demur, expulsion.
 
You envied ghosts their dissolving diagnosis,
their silver fir countenance
& capitulated to body as ambience,
festooned with gorgeous flesh armies:               
each an empire,                        
each an arm with extended wrist.
 
Say goodbye
to all that’s wrung
from beauty with fists
that would forge the yellow wallpaper
& call the crawling sexy.