by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Riding in the swan boat of my youth, I’m
suddenly entering the tunnel of
middle age where the billboards—shall we say—
targeted marketing—have changed. Every
ad is for wrinkle cream and undereye
masks. As if somehow the Ad Execs think
that is what I don’t want to lose: cat calls,

the preying swoop of eyes that wanted to
swallow me up. Cut me down into bite-
size chunks. No, freaks. These days it's Ovid I
can’t stop thinking about. How he was 50—
in his prime—when he pissed off some Roman
emperor who exiled him to Tomis.

He hated it. Kept writing letters home
to Rome, begging to be called for, to be
folded back in. Stuck on that island in
the Black Sea, no one was trying to sell
Ovid beauty products. Exile from the
Latin exul meaning banish. Oh, how
I wish to be banished.

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s fourth collection of poems, West : Fire : Archive, was published by The Center for Literary Publishing in 2021. Her biographies include Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024). Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College, UC Davis and Dominican University and is the Poetry and Translation Director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.

by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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It's how I arrived in this place. Dust. Blood.
Thin figures. Shadows stretched like bars
against a farm gone fallow. Gone dust. Gone wind.

My grandmother said, Steinbeck never got it right.
The place. The leaving and how it felt:
to be child in a world gone back to dust.

She'd breath the dust into me some birthdays.
Or, when I'd come back to visit from college.
Until the dust stuck to my tongue, clouded my eyes
as I tried to drift farther and farther away.
She whispered into my ear the songs she'd sung
in the canneries those long hours she'd worked as a child.
Until the land had become me. No way to escape
the need to carry it, to tell it right.

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer and poet. Her books include the biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and her fourth poetry collection West : Fire : Archive (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2021). She is currently writing a biography about the author Sanora Babb which will be published by the University of California Press 2024.

by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

The purse was the object, not the violence.
An open maw that gaped, while we, away
were bridging (sea wind, slices of rain).  Or,
the purse was an open mouth gone mute, while
I walked alone (low blue sky, one hundred
one cent stamps). You came out of nowhere, or
you wove in and out of five locked cars, an
invisible thread. Each moment became
a film strip, stuttering: how did we get
here? Both occasions, the purse was returned.
Found emptied of valuables on the berm,
or tossed into the tangled wet grass.
You remained ghost shingled with should or could
a genie stitched into each leather flap.

*This poem won first Second Place in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her work has been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, SWWIM, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market, Women’s Studies, and Chicago Quarterly Review. Her biography on Charmian London, Jack London's wife, will be published by University of Oklahoma Press in Spring 2020. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.

by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Apples are imagining themselves
onto hillsides—pink petals stick out their
tongues from the dark mouths of branches
and the forest canopy ripens overnight
until it pulses like a green heart.  Spring
frankensteins us all—softens our cyborg
brains (Admit it: you were thinking about what
mysteries your phone will sing out!) while your
body turns like a tree toward the light. Reader,
somedays it's just too much: powder blue sky,
light wind stirring the leaves as if they are
waving, no, beckoning me to root
and join in. How could I not give in? Trying
to find the song that’s buried in the soil.

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Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press), is her third collection of poetry. It was featured as the Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection for July 2017. Her other books include: Gold Passage and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air. Her work has been published in numerous publications including San Francisco Chronicle, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market 2013, Women’s Studies, and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.