Simone Muench and Jackie K. White

PALL

The faces show nothing, the narrative
fizzles into hum, the drone of spy
craft watches us go numb and mute
as gray sky pall dampens the green

grid of faux grass: a fake vibrancy
fed to this scroll of bodies held in theft.
Minds turn interior or toward vistas with
war zones and role-playing zombies toppling

barricades into bric-a-brac. The stories
we used to tell ourselves fray into ephemera.
Every speech repeats the same not-new.
Biorhythms falter as the seasons slouch

into caricatures of change. These are
dark times, even the bots say, and boring.

SIMONE MUENCH is the author of six books, including Wolf Centos (Sarabande). Hee recent, Suture (Black Lawrence Press), is a collection of sonnets cowritten with Dean Rader. She also edited They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press). She serves as faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review, a poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and created the HB Sunday Reading Series.

JACKIE K. WHITE is the author of three chapbooks, with recent poems and collaborations appearing in Posit, Los Angeles Review, Pleiades, and Posit. She is a professor of English at Lewis University, where she advises the student-run Jet Fuel Review.