Pressed, and: Objection

Abstract

Pressed, and: Objection Simone Muench (bio) and Jackie K. White (bio) Pressed On a sheetless mattress, immobile andundone, I was marked for ruin. I drownedin dread, became a stain, a containerof shatter, of "I don't matter." I'm told to muzzle that memory with pillow plush,and smother all the old mouths' carpingas I'm pressed into performance, pushed to playthat old game perfectly. Now, I turn the mouth into spewing glass. The anatomy of a rupture.I burn. I bellow. I say no I say no I say no.This is the season of the scalpel, not nostalgia.This is the year of scraping out hauntings. I said no. Now I shove that ghost into the fold,press back, iron the sheets of my choosing. [End Page 57] Objection Some wept watching Love Connection. Some weptin search of goddesses. Some wept earlyin the year. Some wept later in a novelwith faces reflected in a pool of vodka. Some were warned by lipstick on the glass.Some did the warning by earmarking oddpages. Some whispered the ancient spells,some wrote coded scripts. All were rejected. But some rose saying no longer betweenlightning's flash & clap. Some rose to mistrial.Some rose to file a missing person's report.Some rose & cast curses, mouths licked in spit, fingers unpricked, pointing, eyes untissued,dry and daring, arms tort-wielding: watch this. [End Page 58] Simone Muench Simone Muench is the author of six books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande, 2014). Her recent, Suture, includes sonnets written with Dean Rader (BLP, 2017). She is an editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (BLP, 2018) and curator, with Kenyatta Rogers, of the HB Sunday Reading Series in Chicago. She serves as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review and as a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Jackie K. White Sam Taylor is the author of three books of poems, including Body of the World (Ausable/Copper Canyon) Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry), and The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse (forthcoming, Negative Capability). "White Trash" is an excerpt from The Book of Fools, a book-length experimental elegy for our earth and oceans that marries global, ecological themes of loss to personal, confessional ones. He is an Associate Professor and the Director of the MFA Program at Wichita State. He received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and his poems have appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, AGNI, and The New Republic. <www.samtaylor.us> Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press