Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Why I Forgot the Story of the Dead Child at Tioga Pass and my Okie Heritage
The ascent alone could stop a heart. Shale
shards raining down hillsides in a slow slide.
Have I ever told you, my heart can’t make
it up a climb that steep? Especially,
wearing this dress of gravity and time.
Especially, during a super bloom:
all those blue-eyed forget-me-nots staring back.
Especially, driving a Model T.
Because the getting there was so dusted,
choked. The land had folded. Everything
packed and loaded, strapped into the back
of the tin car like a lost circus. Because
she was alive when they left Oklahoma.
Because she was a twin: entangled in
another’s life in a constrictor knot.
Because her eyes were blue as glacier-melt
lakes. Because what could they have done with her
seven-year-old body once she went deep and cold.
Because I’ve built my family’s stories out
of make-shift shacks. Blankets tacked to walls, flapping
tongues in the wind. Because the granite walls
of the Sierra-Nevada mountains
rose to meet them once they made the ascent.
Because she became a blue moth, a barn swallow
sewing the sky shut at twilight,
a constellation that blurred
into the swift current of the Milky
Way. Because I never learned to untie
the knot that held what we’d carried up.
Never learned to dive deep into that want.
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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