[Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead]
Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead—
a house composed of snow, an empty bed.
If you linger before exposure
there will be marsh light, an open window,
a soft sound floating like a ghost above
the pond. Dear dark self,
this life is a glove
of matchsticks and sorrow. So, why do we
search so hard for that hand of gasoline?—
always craving the blue blaze that will erase
us. When all that’s left will be a sooted space,
a lover’s charcoal tracing, sunspot of loss
and levin. Keep moving, hungry one. With no
moon to guide you, the only way to cross
over is to slip on the black hood and go.

Simone Muench is the author of five poetry books including Wolf Centos (2014), Orange Crush (2010), and Lampblack & Ash (2005), all from Sarabande Books. Lampblack & Ash won the 2004 Kathryn A. Morton Prize. Her collaborative sonnets written with Dean Rader have been published or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review , Zyzzyva , New American Writing , and POOL , among others. Her chapbook Trace (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) won the fall 2012 Black River Chapbook Competition. She has been the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, a 2013 Yaddo artists’ residency, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, and two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, among others. She earned a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She directs the writing program at Lewis University where she serves as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review . Photo by Chiyoko Yoshida

Dean Rader’s most recent book, Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the best poetry books of the year. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days (Truman State University Press, 2010), won the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Rader edited the 2013 poetry collection 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry (The Press). He is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco. Photo by Gavin Rader