Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Ballad of the Russian River in Stop-Time
house on a hill skirted by blackberry brambles. fingers bloodied with juice. fear on it’s haunches can’t see a black bear until it’s too late river threading around it The house was three stories suction tubes in walls became vacuums pool was cold as hell a stone to jump off instead of a board love spiked in gummy heels my first barbie at night space spun a disco ball star shards splinter into what we forgot river bridged, but far enough we thought rain would come meteorites sing silver-throated then nothing but void nothing but flood forty feet 100 year high water mark you underwater you can’t hear time breathing too many stones (that buried orchestra) tumbling past
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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