Iris Jamahl Dunkle

email

Iris Jamahl Dunkle currently lives and works in Northern California. She received her M.F.A. from New York University and her Ph.D. in English from Case Western Reserve University in 2010. Her chapbook Inheritance was published by Finishing Line Press in June 2010. Her work has also appeared in numerous publications including: Fence, Boxcar Poetry Review, Kaleidowhirl, SNReview, Thin Air, Eaden Water’s Press Home Anthology, Hessler 2006 Poetry & Prose Annual, Cleveland in Prose and Poetry, and The Squaw Valley Writers Review. Her chapter on the cultural context of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar will be published by Salem Press in 2011.


The Conversation a Little Girl has With Herself
is the Size of an Apple.


When the little girl woke she discovered
she was wearing an apron all covered

in dirt, but clean slate the apple was
gone. All she had left of it was the space
it once contained. So, she swallowed the space,
let, the tiny balloon rise to her head,

the apple’s color filling her cheeks: red!
red! I said, the conversation, I said,
a little girl has herself, an apple.



Dinosaur

I can feel the sadness of the large head
that floats in the museum like a planet

the metronome of feet shuffling past
a little sun powdering the lifted dust and it’s haloed

Weeks, years, knees
Red-raw in the dug dirt

A scientist dug you free and spelt you out for your new skin

Now the dinosaur contains what we imagined it could
A life that’s visible we can reconstruct

And all these people shuffling past
Faith or what church do you believe in

What’s behind the glass behind the skin of this life as we pass

I am an alphabet of bones,
my own telling.

Photography Lesson, Pt. Reyes

My father teaches me landscape
here, where the land itself cannot decide
to which age it raises its stiff thumb.

I have a decision to make—
a few names to throw in the ocean.

We walk up the bare beach—
We look through a machine—
He says don’t forget
you are looking through a machine.

Your emotions will ruin it.

The hills beyond are almost bald—
a lone raven marks in an arc their curve
then lands still in a nest of waves.

Ravens, he says, will never appear in pairs.

I push the shutter down
let the machine realize
what I have learned,
as something scares the bird to flight.

Why must stories overlap? I ask
but my father is already walking,
the machine ticking faster
than waves can count.       

BACK TO SONOMA POET TEACHERS