teeth-grinder, lace-cutter

a Mansour and Tanning assemblage

From cheap coffins, the dead blaze 
              like stained glass in the gloom. Their airbrushed
eyes of storms and logics, say Don’t look at me
 
as they raise rustic blood to the sun’s gullet
              choked on hearsay and debris. Their hands
crackle, small iron hands, and the pewter hand mirror                    
 
spills a thousand satellites into the afterglow
              where centuries meet. Like overwrought cannibals, 
their mouths capsize with faucets and strawberries
 
as they crisscross the alleys of waterlogged moss,                               
              scatter the rotted teeth of a rabbit, smear their hair
with fog and bile. But we, wily and thievish, imprison
 
their carrion beauty in oval picture frames and snuff
               their starlight through salted lips. We lure them
with vinegar kisses, night spit. We wait in surgical green.    

Jackie K. White

Jackie K. White is the author of three chapbooks, the chapbook Hex & Howl and the full-length The Under Hum, both collaboratively written with Simone Muench and published by Black Lawrence Press.

Simone Muench

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), Orange Crush (Sarabande), Wolf Centos(Sarabande), and The Under Hum (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), cowritten with Jackie K. White.

Poets’ Note:

We are engaged in a specific project of collaborative poems, tentatively titled “The Alchemy of Ghosts,” wherein we engage with the voices of the women associated with both the artistic and literary Surrealist movement, who have often been historically marginalized. This poem is an “assemblage,” a form we created to honor the collage and frottage techniques of the surrealists, here drawing on the works and words of Joyce Mansour and Dorothea Tanning. As one of our goals is for our poems to converse with, and pay homage to, these groundbreaking surrealists, this poem also functions as a 4-way dialogue blending their voices with ours in the hopes of showcasing them so that the “dead blaze like stained glass in the gloom.”