Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Medusa’s Broken Sonnet
What is the meta for? I’ve got a blue-
skied view to soothe my brain, days when I look
up from hunch and shuffle of everyday.
Night air punctuated by owls and howls
of packs of coyotes. Moon a sliver—
Limestone under me shifts its weight with shakes
too small to detect and the oaks toss their
Medussan hair—history has its reckonings—
understories stirred up by a hot wind.
Our minds like blown stars, lost decades ago.
Who was Medusa anyway, but a
young girl who was raped, who dared speak out.
The snakes, the murder, that was all just smoke
and mirrors. A way to change the story
to reduce her power. So, reader, the oaks—
when I say they fill my view with green curls
and shadow, there are no serpents a foot.
Those trees stand, command the power that they
could someday burn this whole story down.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is the author of Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (WordTech Communications, 2015). Her work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market 2013, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. She was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
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