Leonor Fini’s Divination with Cats
Breaking open the black egg,
the lynx bred from scattered skulls
was, like me, never wife nor lover,
nor a girl costumed against a father's grasp,
scolded for listening at keyholes. Instead,
like Astarte and the Red Queen, I welcomed
the ocelot in me, the ouroboros
nestled in my throat. Now, I braid
woodsmoke and thistle in my hair.
Each black strand dons a different mask.
Each mask has the face of a Siamese cat.
If I arch, do not call me into your glaring.
I’ve enthroned myself, sit robed
in feathered decree while the dead kneel
and I collect their eyes in an hourglass.
the lynx bred from scattered skulls
was, like me, never wife nor lover,
nor a girl costumed against a father's grasp,
scolded for listening at keyholes. Instead,
like Astarte and the Red Queen, I welcomed
the ocelot in me, the ouroboros
nestled in my throat. Now, I braid
woodsmoke and thistle in my hair.
Each black strand dons a different mask.
Each mask has the face of a Siamese cat.
If I arch, do not call me into your glaring.
I’ve enthroned myself, sit robed
in feathered decree while the dead kneel
and I collect their eyes in an hourglass.
Olga Orozco’s Calendar of Snow
In the rain’s inventory, a trace
of an initial on the windowpane
dark as blown pupils marks
your absence. Beyond the blight
of frost and silence, a thicket,
where your presence dwells,
scratches a tunnel into the subsoil.
And, I, a drowned woman, launch
a constellation past the sentry,
breaking bonfires into grasslands.
And now the cold is a scepter
I clutch in my teeth. A grief
I bite down on, knuckling
its fanged organism with a marred
collection box of membranes
dredged from old stories.
December has no scent,
its whitened landscape
is a far wall with iron bars
that have been gnawed.
I straddle this sadness, cut
its cloth into a tourniquet
I wrap around the world’s
nettled pulse, waiting
for junipers to transform into lamps
following the anatomy
of a sibyl whose hair
was drawn from the ink of ravens
and whose jawline opens
the hymnal of your farewell.
of an initial on the windowpane
dark as blown pupils marks
your absence. Beyond the blight
of frost and silence, a thicket,
where your presence dwells,
scratches a tunnel into the subsoil.
And, I, a drowned woman, launch
a constellation past the sentry,
breaking bonfires into grasslands.
And now the cold is a scepter
I clutch in my teeth. A grief
I bite down on, knuckling
its fanged organism with a marred
collection box of membranes
dredged from old stories.
December has no scent,
its whitened landscape
is a far wall with iron bars
that have been gnawed.
I straddle this sadness, cut
its cloth into a tourniquet
I wrap around the world’s
nettled pulse, waiting
for junipers to transform into lamps
following the anatomy
of a sibyl whose hair
was drawn from the ink of ravens
and whose jawline opens
the hymnal of your farewell.
Valentine Penrose Offers this Travelogue:
I followed two women who macheted
their way through a black sun
through a frigid military odor.
The next day, an armory of brass
eyes spun as they tasseled
the January night in sea salt.
All they wanted was to row
beyond avalanche and abyss
beyond grief and her needled
minions into the sea’s sun-doused
chambers. All I wanted was to turn
when they made a crescent
of the shoreline, the Aegean hue
smoothing their faces, their eyes
filling with firebirds, their mouths
with ink. I was mistaken, they said.
There is no end to any journey,
not even this from the Seine
to the Nile, from the Ganges to sand dunes.
Here, I've documented their thirst: how it scattered
forth in a legion of pale blue horses.
their way through a black sun
through a frigid military odor.
The next day, an armory of brass
eyes spun as they tasseled
the January night in sea salt.
All they wanted was to row
beyond avalanche and abyss
beyond grief and her needled
minions into the sea’s sun-doused
chambers. All I wanted was to turn
when they made a crescent
of the shoreline, the Aegean hue
smoothing their faces, their eyes
filling with firebirds, their mouths
with ink. I was mistaken, they said.
There is no end to any journey,
not even this from the Seine
to the Nile, from the Ganges to sand dunes.
Here, I've documented their thirst: how it scattered
forth in a legion of pale blue horses.
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Simone Muench is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and the author of seven full-length books, including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande; Kathryn A. Morton Prize), Wolf Centos (Sarabande), and The Under Hum (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), cowritten with Jackie K. White. Poems are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, North American Review, swamp pink, New Letters, and elsewhere. In 2025, she received writing fellowships to The Hambidge Center, Wildacres Residency, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
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Jackie K. White is the co-author, with Simone Muench, of Hex & Howl (Black Lawrence Press, 2021; Society of Midland Authors Honoree) and The Under Hum (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). Her collaborations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Ecotone, Salamander, Pleiades, Hopkins Review, Shenandoah, Phoebe, The Journal, The Offing, Allium, and others. One of her collaborations with Muench received the 2025 Mary Blinn Poetry Award from After Hours Press.
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