July has always been

heavy with sorrow or the sensuous. Simone Muench's work reminds me of both and their love-children various are what I turn to when I want to think about how luscious any single taste of language can be. From her upcoming collection, Orange Crush, I offer a tease:

Orange Girl Suite

1:
|Young women carrying baskets of oranges used to stand near the stage in London theatres and sell oranges at sixpence apiece and themselves for little more|

between dresses we came.
between naked and nothing
we slipped into the delirious
coils of perfected ears,

pear dust on our skin
sarsparilla sounding our
fizzied song in sailor mouths.

we were translated by churchwomen
who placed umlauts over our words.

when we recovered, we were sold
in beautiful clothes, sent sailing into the gulf
where the moon pitched
its lemon-lateness over the celluloid

slickness of sea. we were movie stars
who never entered the frame.
we were green and gone

lisping "o" words in the air:
ode, odalisque, obituary.



Orange Girl Cast

1: the fever
(starring kristy b)

Sweet Kristy of the culvert, the ankle turn, the verb imperfect, and sailors' notebooks. In this metropolis of binoculars and chicken bones, in this city black with chicken-wire alchemists and bloody gutters, she feigns a fever in her red brassiere, her lavender dress lilting across headlights of chrome sedans: skin livid-exquisite with light bulbs and batteries beneath sinister-shouldered men, zombie drunk from fermented peaches and her silk stocking smell. Sweet Kristy of the corset, born of Anne Boleyn and a bird collector, born of alum and blindfolds, born to unzip men's breath, their clamorous wrists with an alphabet on her breast, a switchblade pinned to her taffeta thigh. Where are you leading with your eyelets and hooks, catching men with clothespins and rain in the perfect sphere of your dance hall mouth.



4: the train track
(starring mary b)

Train track flutter girl; coriander lips and Prohibition ale. That empty mouth like a bottle on a man's neck. Marabou soft, doe's muzzle on a pomegranate split, ultraviolet. You might have to rid yourself of all the boys, mostly rapscallions. How they feel under hands: red fish, big branches caught in your rain-rinsed hair, river tresses. For your ankle, a thread of nine carat bone. While the crossbuck sign bells with danger, citronella girls smoke Parliaments with a felon; your campfire jaw, a kerosene swoon.