Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Archive (a Duet)
Mud, feel of silk. Mind can bloom into
anything, plant it deep enough.
Marigolds loll on lollipop heads.
Wind scatters and bends.
[since California is its own muse…]
Raw throated. Storm
grows. Loud as years. Hunger
is something you hold in your hips.
[within pure joy exists a kind of hollow]
Things moving. Anonymity of motion.
Face pressed to glass.
A found light at the tunnel’s edge.
[the weather is not the windows fault]
Words shaved by sparks
danger preserved in the bog of the mind.
What rises, revises, surface.
[Oh the bodies I loved were very tired]
At the fair, at every fair the psychic sits
in a moveable booth behind
skin of lace and fear. Pace sidewalk.
[I was no sad animal graveyard.]
Find night sweats. Sound of owls.
Deconstruction through
a construction of questions.
[and after your research among the transcripts of the institution
what gives you immortal life turns out to be the breath of another person.]
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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