IHLR 2019 PhotoFinish

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2019 PhotoFinish

Editor-in-Chief

Leslie Jill Patterson Nonfiction Editor

Elena Passarello Poetry Editor

Geffrey Davis Fiction Editor

Katie Cortese

Literary Review PhotoFinish

December 2019

Managing Editors

Jennifer Popa Meghan E. Giles Jennifer Buentello Valerie Wayson

Associate Editors: Timilehin Alake, Jasmine Bailey, Caleb Braun, Emma Brousseau, Nathaniel Brown, William Brown, Andrew Gillis, Jacob Hall, Katherine Jackson, Maeve Kirk, Jesse Lawhead, Brook McClurg, William Littlejohn-Oram, Zachary Ostraff, D Patterson, Matthew Porto, Catherine Ragsdale, Sara Ryan, Kate Simonian, and Peter Vertacnik.

Cover and Interior Photos: Shutterstock.

Copyright © 2019 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved.

Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. It is published six times a year at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department.

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Contents

PhotoFinish | December 2019 Foreword

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Leslie Jill Patterson

To a Dropped Egg

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Alice Duggan

Winner Finalists God Gives Up the Sun The Weak Spot Vertigo Deep Fried with Slaw on the Side Mixing It Up with Mama No Use Crying Walking on Eggshells Jamestown Redux Hide and Seek Dear Poem Contributors

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Jason Gray Susan Jewell Matthew Sutton Katherine Seluja N. R. Robinson Charles Venable Leah Skay Vivian Wagner Neil Carpathios M. Soledad Caballero

For this year’s Photofinish, we chose a photo that, for us, symbolized the idea of beginning. Which comes first? The chicken or the egg? What is the first and most important meal of any day?

If you break something, you must start anew. In this issue, the egg, as muse, becomes the genesis of the creative act, the seed of metaphor, the moment narrative takes on meaning, the moment a poem cracks open on the page.

I suppose there is no more critical beginning than the very second we take oxygen into our lungs for the first time. For his series of photographs entitled Cesar—a 2014 winner of the LensCulture Exposure Award and shortlisted in the Portraiture category of the 2015 Sony World Photography Awards—Christian Berthelot snapped portraits of over forty infants seconds after they were born via caesarean section. Then the obstetrician or doula or midwife placed the babies in their mothers’ arms, handing them over to whatever life their mothers could provide, which started right then. Many of the flash poems, stories, and essays in this issue turn toward mothers—mythological mothers, dead mothers, angry mothers, mothers who haunt us, mothers haunted by their children, mothers who curse their children.

Mother: The Queen of All Beginnings.

However our contributors interpret our yearly photo prompt, we always love watching the multitude of perspectives stitch together in our midnight year-end finale. We can’t think of a better way to end one production year—and begin another. At the stroke of midnight, we bid 2019 adieu and welcome the clean slate of 2020: 365 brand new days to welcome and fill.

Foreword

LESLIE JILL PATTERSON EDITOR

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To a Dropped Egg

Alice Duggan

O break, O crack, O clear mucus of white, O rising rounded promise of yolk. Sing, all ye oily lipids, sing. Sing of protein, bring on your luscious fat.

In the wide world of mammals, you’re more than a token. Sing over easy, sing angel food cake.

Hum while you’re whole.

Why stop when you’re broken?

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God Gives Up the Sun Jason Gray

From the broken egg The solar system was born.

The yellow sphere nestling Into its gravity well.

Pluto is already falling Through cracks in the brick.

Given enough time, the whole Shebang will fry and be Swallowed into the black Hole of a dog’s mouth.

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The Weak Spot Susan Jewell

Blame the Greeks: Had the mother of Achilles just let go, dropping her son into the River Styx, would we even know another’s frailties, the weak spots we use to rout out breaking points, like we did in our last tiff, the one about nothing, when we poked at each others’ susceptible sore until the hard shell of raw ego broke like a metaphor— opened and separated, the damage was done.

In the River of Hate, when Thetis gripped her son, how could she have known that having no mercy we’ll prick each vulnerability, willfully aiming for the heel?

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Vertigo

Matthew Sutton Johnnie held the card closed, creased over her middle finger. After some time and by an act of her thumb, she opened the card and reread the words.

Johnnie, your vertigo and the anniversary of Cooper’s passing—two reasons to let you know I’m thinking of you.

Love, Your Brother.

Clasping the card, she brought her hand to her mouth and stifled a grievous ebullition. The movement was detached from her will as if she had been manipulated by the whim of a deft puppeteer.

Her husband’s thudding footsteps preceded him.

“Morning, hun.” Two hairy-knuckled hands came to rest on her shoulder, and Doug planted a breathy kiss on her cheek.

Johnnie winced, but her gaze remained forward, out the back window. Beyond the chicken-scratched Bermuda grass and over the gentle lake, the day made its morning lustrations, cleansing itself of the night.

Sunlight flickered through undulant tree-tops while dissonant tweets and whistles from dining birds kept rhythm with the dull hum of a far-off boat.

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“I’m thinking eggs,” Doug said.

Johnnie’s mouth cinched tight, a futile attempt to smile, amplifying the delta of wrinkles flowing from each corner of her lips.

Johnnie and Doug had two hens. They used to have three, but a couple of years ago, one had been run over. As Johnnie descended the porch stairs, she recalled the day Jenny, the Ameraucana, was hit by the 4Runner. Cooper, her son, had left the front gate open, and Jenny, who was keen on escape, ran blindly into the grill of an oncoming SUV. A severely broken leg caused her bloody rump to gyrate wildly with each step as if she were some Vodou dancer possessed by the pounding of a drum. As she died, Cooper’s detached gaze and emotional absence confirmed Johnnie and Doug’s suspicions. Back then, it was not yet an “epidemic”; they had never heard of Fentanyl or Narcan.

A distant ringing in Johnnie’s ear accompanied her to the coop.

The hens were broody as usual, but Johnnie was patient and gentle—she knew their pain, “us mothers of dead children.”

She collected three brown eggs and, using her shirt to carry them, returned to the porch. On the first step, the ringing in her ears intensified, but the puppeteer willed her forward. On the second came a wave of nausea. She lurched hard to the left and became terribly aware of her own fleshy agency, her impotence. The strings had been cut loose. A single egg fell from her shirt as she stumbled onto the porch landing. Albumen and yolk leaked from the cracked egg onto the porch like overdose spittle onto a T-shirt.

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Deep Fried with Slaw on the Side Katherine Seluja

Squawking in the early hours. White fluff all over the yard. It was always about those damn chickens. Leghorn and Rhode Island Red. And now here you are, laboring in a loft above the coop. How did high on the hog turn to peck and scratch so quickly? Only a few fowl-free years back, you were living smooth as a freshly plucked thigh. Of course, there had been a few bumps. The night you swallowed down two cartons of eggs with a bottle of GoLytely. That Tyson’s Family cook-off

when you accidentally set the barn on fire. It took weeks to get the smell of burnt feathers out of your hair. And you haven’t been back to Wilkesboro since. Another roll of pain, and you pull a few feathers from your mouth. That darn squawking! Must be the hen with the riot of yellow fluff on her head. The one you call Aunt Rose-On-Her-Way-to-Mass.

Which makes you think of palms, and the room immediately sways. You try not to notice the walls are contracting in time with your labor. Cleansing breath, cleansing breath, you hear a voice whisper, but you think, How the heck will I cleanse my life of this? Feathering your nest was never a sentiment you took seriously. More cackles from the girls in the yard, and you feel the irresistible urge to squat. If the labor keeps up its pace, you’re sure you can get this chick out in time for supper.

Mixing It Up with Mama

N. R. Robinson

I awake to the clanking of pans on burners and what had been a distant memory: the smell of creamed eggs and toast. Mama’s “Hope you’re hungry!” confirms she still has eyes in the back of her head.

When I’d gotten the word to haul ass to D.C., I’d been stuck in a place, Aberle Home for Boys, in the wee town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania.

Out of the blue came the call: Grandma warning that Mama was shacked

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up. “You won’t believe it,” she promised. “Her fiancé is a nutjob from their asylum. You need to get down here quick!”

“Hold up,” I said. “What can I do?” Well, wasn’t I, at fifteen-and-threequarters, practically a man? And who, if not me, would put an end to their madness? When I arrived in the early AM, I was worn out, thumbing it through the revolutionary air of the ’70’s Civil Rights Struggle.

Foggy with sleep, I stand and hug Mama’s back (though I am no longer the hugging type). Mama seems preoccupied with preparation, yet zeal climbs through the cloth of her cotton shift (though Mama is no longer the zealous type).

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“You sleep good?” she asks. At my grunt, she adds, “Where you living?

Where’s your sister now? Y’all keep in touch?”—all in concerned earnestness.

He, Mama’s “nutjob,” is still asleep.

Earnest-acting, I shoot back: “Everything’s fine. Yeah, we do. Things couldn’t be better, Ma.” My voice sounds incomplete.

After years apart, here I am being unfruitful, by not-so-earnestly mixing it up with Mama. I feel awful about my closed-up state. But why worry her if she can do nothing to help?

Because of our untethered relationship, Mama doesn’t dig deeper. Or, possibly, her words these days are simply few and far between. As for myself, I hope—studying her new serenity in the creamed-eggs-smelling air—that I am seeing Mama’s future.

Early on in her hospitalization (a.k.a. her institutionalization, a.k.a. her incarceration), Mama took to smoking. After our meal, Mama draws at a Kool menthol and then breathes a fistful of smoke. For no better reason than my rage is up in smoke and mingling amicably with hers, I think: My “putting an end to” can wait ’til later.

“So, when’s the big day?” I mumble, as she’s wiping down the table.

In lieu of an answer, Mama hauls me to my feet. As we embrace, she whispers in a scraped-out voice, “You a sweet boy, Nicky.” With an extension of her arms, we are face-to-face: her bright umber irises are flecked with cinnamon and embers. You can nearly see them afire, see something afire in them. It is as if Mama is forever looking at a sky burning. “Just stay outta trouble,” she says, “and everythin’ll work out,” as if her God has said such directly to her. Then Mama gently turns me in the direction of the door.

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No Use Crying

Charles Venable

Mom always told me the chickens were harmless—they wouldn’t hurt me if I didn’t hurt them—but our dog never drew close to them. He circled around the flock with his tail between his legs. Normally, he followed me everywhere, but not into the chicken pen.

I understood why when I got inside. The smell of shit and raw dirt clung to the corners of the coiled wire, and loose feathers tickled my nose as they rose in a stray sunbeam. I sneezed, and the chickens scattered with squeals and squawks. They found their way around my legs, through the door, and out into a half-circle of clucking and pecking around the door. My dog fled, abandoned me to deal with the birds alone.

Inside the pen, the rooster pranced back and forth, head cocked to the side, one eye watching me as I tiptoed through the mud to the wooden boxes of damp straw where the chickens laid their eggs. His crest fell back, and he crowed into the air—it was half-past noon.

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Most of the chickens fled the pen when the door opened for them. They pawed at the ground for bugs or grass or whatever chickens actually eat. The boxes were left alone, with two or three shit-stained eggs settled in the straw, but one hen always remained in her box, lying on her eggs. As I approached her, all her feathers fluffed up, and she honked at me, like a goose.

“Just let me have them,” I sighed.

I reached for her, and she pecked me, a blur of red and orange and white and black. I drew my hand back; it didn’t hurt.

Getting pecked never hurt: it was like being poked with a stick—a surprise, a nuisance. It never hurt.

She never pecked my mom. I watched her lift the hen’s butt into the air and steal the eggs right out from under her. The hen never stopped honking and squawking, but she never pecked her. When I didn’t reach a second time, she relaxed; feathers settled, honking became cooing.

When the hen relaxed, I reached for her again. I did it slow, like Mom used to, until my fingers brushed feathers and warmth covered my hand. She was like a bubble of warm, tickling water. Beneath her, I felt the curving shells of two eggs. I grabbed both, squeezed gently between my fingers.

The sting of her beak chased the warmth away as soon as my hand escaped her feathers. She squawked again, and one of the eggs tumbled to the ground. The shell shattered, splattering my legs with albumen. The yolk punctured on the jagged edge of the shell; I watched it spill out, melt into the mud and chicken shit.

I imagined my mother standing in the door of the pen, tutting: Now look what you’ve done.

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Walking on Eggshells Leah Skay

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Mother makes pancakes on Sundays per your father’s request. Some of those Sundays are blissfully uneventful: a calm breeze comes through the window above the farm sink, and she sits across from you at the table with a cup of coffee and a crossword puzzle. Relish those Sundays like a warm meal on a cold day; this is not one of those Sundays.

She stands at the countertop with a brown-shelled egg in her bony hand. Don’t stare at the tan-line on her ring finger. Ignore the way her silver manicure turns her fingers into polished, serrated blades. Try to forget her hands entirely until she cracks the egg on the edge of the countertop. The shell splinters and halves in her hands. It is not gentle.

On other Sundays, she kisses the corner of a scalloped bowl and breaks the egg between careful fingers; she hums to the radio playing in the living room, channeling the spirit of happy housewives past. This is not one of those Sundays. Try to forget her hands entirely until you hear this crack again with another egg. Thin egg white leaks from the countertop and drips to the floor. Try, fail, and give in. She is imagining that egg is your father, but you know the egg is you.

Sit at the table in your pajamas. Mother glances occasionally to make sure you’re still there. You don’t get to run away and hide like your father does. You’re a family: happy together, hateful together. Twirl the threads from the fraying placemat around your finger until the skin turns white. Don’t wonder why he’s late or if he’s coming at all. The fact that he suggested it doesn’t guarantee his commitment. It’s a futile attempt at reconciliation, a plea deal to escape the harsh punishment of a divorced family. Don’t worry about it. There’s nothing left you can do but sit at the table and cut off the circulation to your finger.

Mother holds another egg. Hold your breath. A car locks outside with a faint electronic chirp and a flash of headlights. The recipe only needs two eggs. One is in the bowl, another dripping to the floor. Mother holds the third egg suspended in stillness. Don’t look at her hands.

Don’t look at the front door. Watch the floor and wait to hear the next egg crack.

Jamestown Redux Vivian Wagner

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“The long experience of our late miseries . . .

I hope is sufficient to persuade everyone to a present correction of himself. . . .”

—John Smith The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624)

The starving year started early, even before they arrived, and perhaps it’s still going on. We’re still licking the blood from the faces of the fallen, after all, to nourish ourselves, and we still have companies that lie to stay alive in a wilderness they don’t understand. Maybe, though, we’ll learn. Maybe we’ll earn something like redemption if we piece together this broken egg, if we solve the puzzle of the town, the land, our own violent selves. We, like they, can only hope, while shivering in the almost-forgiving shade of yet-uncut pines.

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Hide and Seek

Neil Carpathios

Impatient for it to hatch, every morning I’d rush to where it lay on grass, nudge it with a stick to wake the baby I pictured curled up sleeping. But it never moved.

I heard a tick inside. I pictured the chick flicking on a lamp to read his little instruction book on how to be what he’d be—a bird. Chapter One: Catching Worms.

Chapter Two: How to Build a Nest. Chapter Three: How to Recognize Windows and Not Smash Glass. And so on.

I got tired of waiting. I took a rock and mashed it into yellow goo. Then I poked through embryonic slime and bits of broken shell, determined to find the book every living thing must read. It all comes back, as hands and feet against my inner walls kick, punch, scratch.

Something pushes me apart. I start to see. When all our secret places were used, we found a new way to fool each other: we grew adult bodies to hide inside.

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Dear Poem

M. Soledad Caballero

You will not come. You refuse. You will not elucidate God or love, The tendril vines and shapes of marriage, illness, the Oscar nominees.

You are silent, a cracked, yellow shell. I trust you for something, anything. I want you to be curse and mantra. Instead, you sit heavy.

You do not forget. You just do not reveal. An elephant in mud.

This is what madness must be. To spend the days stuck in front of white spaces, imagining color. You demand worship and work.

You are a wicked queen with red lips and an apple, ready to kill.

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Contributors M. SOLEDAD CABALLERO teaches at Allegheny College. A 2017 CantoMundo fellow, she has published poems in The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Memorius, Crab Orchard Review, Anomaly, and other venues. Caballero writes that she thinks about poems cracking and splitting open all the time: “For me, at least, there has to be a break in my idea, both to let some light in and also to do something with other pieces that might not have existed before. When I saw the cracked egg on the floor in the IHLR photo prompt, I saw what writer’s block and this idea of cracking might do together in my poems. There are so many ways to approach writing, but sometimes I think one of my ways is to see how things are not able to be put together as I originally imagined. Sometimes that reality is amazing and a delight, but sometimes it’s like the egg on the floor, which cannot be made into anything else but the thing itself cracked on the floor. Poems can be incredibly annoying because they are not always easy. They play pranks—or at least that’s what it feels like when I have writer’s block. ‘Dear Poem’ was a way for me to write through my frustration at those moments when the writing isn’t working and, still, the next day or week, I’ll have to try again, even when there’s still the chance the whole thing might just crack apart.”

NEIL CARPATHIOS is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Confessions of a Captured Angel (Terrapin Books, 2016) and Far Out Factoids (FutureCycle Press, 2017). Additionally, his most recent chapbook,The Function of Sadness, won the 2015 Slipstream Press Chapbook Competition. In 2014, he edited the anthology Every River on Earth: Writ-

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ing from Appalachian Ohio (Ohio University Press). He teaches at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio. About his essay, “Hide and Seek,” Carpathios writes, “The piece springs from the childhood memory of impatiently waiting for a discovered egg to hatch and imagining what was going on inside that shell. Later, in adulthood, I began to realize how we, as adults, often exist inside our own shells, hiding our true selves from the world. The act of hatching, then, is one of liberation and birth in the literal and emotional sense.”

ALICE DUGGAN’s poetry has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry East, and elsewhere; also, in a chapbook, A Brittle Thing, and an anthology, Home, from Holy Cow! Press. She’s interested in dailiness, iplain speech, the timbre of voices, and telling stories. Of her winning poem, “To a Dropped Egg,” Duggan says, “A good egg is a thing to celebrate, even if it’s on the floor.”

JASON GRAY is the author of Radiation King (winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden, as well as two chapbooks, How to Paint the Savior Dead and Adam & Eve Go to the Zoo. His poems have been featured in Poetry, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Image, and elsewhere. Find him online at http://jason-gray.net. About his poem, “God Gives Up the Sun,” Grays says, “In the case of this poem, the creation was pretty straightforward—the photograph prompt sparked the conceit. I was lucky this time—the poem came almost whole—something that’s probably only happened once before. I think

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and write often about space, so the full egg yolk naturally suggested the sun to me, and the spill of the albumen looked like the elliptical shape of the solar system. If the egg is God, I guess I side with the egg coming first in the great chicken v. egg debate.”

SUSAN CARROLL JEWELL is a regular at the Second Wednesday Poetry Open Mic in Schenectady, New York. She loves everything about ekphrasis, including its ancient Greek origins. Her poem, “The Weak Spot,” began without rhyme—and was initially three times the length it is now. “The beginning and end,” she says, “are similar in both versions, but the entire middle was revised. The original idea was a quarrel about the structural integrity of a chicken’s eggshell, that its innate strength is compromised only when pressure is applied to a small spot.

I removed the details and dramatic escalation of the couple’s tiff because domestic arguments are often about nothing. How we strategize the battle is the stuff of Greek mythology.”

N. R. ROBINSON grew up in Junior Village, a Washington D.C.-based, government-run orphanage that was the oldest and largest institution of its kind in America. A ninth-grade dropout, Robinson went on to earn a general equivalency diploma and then graduated from the University of the District of Columbia. In 2006, he left an executive position at Microsoft to begin the thirteen-year journey of scribing his coming-of-age memoir, Our Family Walks. A graduate of the creative writing programs at Florida Atlantic University (MFA, 2009) and the University of Missouri (PhD, 2016), he is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Claflin University, where he serves as Editor of the student literary journal, Edisto River Review. He can be contacted at nickrobi@hotmail.com. About his essay, “Mixing It Up with Mama,” Robinson says, “I was attending my first writing conference of the summer, the 2019 Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and our non-

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fiction workshop leader, Dinty W. Moore, gave us the prompt ‘the smell of home.’ I immediately recalled my mother cooking creamed eggs for my sister Cookie and me when we were small children. That delicious smell filled our small apartment. As I sat down to write that evening, I remembered seeing a writing contest with a prompt photo that had something to do with eggs. A Google search brought me to IHLR’s PhotoFinish page and the photo of a broken egg. The idea was set; my fingers flew.”

KATHERINE DIBELLA SELUJA is a poet and nurse practitioner. She is the author of Gather the Night (UNM Press, 2018), a poetry collection that focuses on the impact of mental illness. She co-authored We Are Meant to Carry Water (3: A Taos Press, 2019) with Tina Carlson and Stella Reed. This collaborative poetry collection, a response to the 2016 presidential election, is filled with voices of the feminine: mythical, archetypal, and universal. She describes her story, “Deep Fried with Slaw on the Side,” as a birth story: “It was written in honor of my youngest child. Our neighbors raised chickens, and throughout my pregnancy, I’d hear ‘the girls’ clucking and squawking daily just before noon. I presumed they were announcing the arrival of their latest efforts. As I labored at home on the day my daughter was born, I felt a strange camaraderie with those hens.”

LEAH SKAY is a student at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, where she is majoring in Writing. During the summers, she lives with her mother, father, and little brother in Dover, Delaware. She writes that the origins of her story, “Walking on Eggshells,” comes from “the concept of subtle abuse: when someone isn’t explicitly violent, verbally or physically, but expresses their discontent with something/someone through indirect action. Washing dishes, folding laundry, household maintenance—all of these tasks seem harmless, until you can almost

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hear how much the person performing the chore wants to hit or yell.

Here, a child sitting at a table while Mom angrily fixes breakfast signifies both potential abuse and the subtlety of such a thing.”

MATTHEW SUTTON works as a Machine Technician in Greenville, South Carolina. His story, “Vertigo,” is his first published work, and about it, Sutton says, “This story has three distinct points of genesis: an odd letter found at a Buddhist vihara in my hometown, a gruesome scene involving a family of geese on a highway, and a story titled “J.J. FTW,” written by Karen Tucker and published in The Yale Review. Each one of these points, whether witnessed or read, elicited strong emotional reactions and left indelible marks upon my mind. I intended to write separate stories inspired by each, but through the picture of the broken egg, the three inspirations were woven together to create ‘Vertigo.’”

CHARLES VENABLE is a storyteller from the Southeastern United States.

He believes stories and poems are about “getting there,” not “being there,” and he enjoys those tales that take their time getting to the point.

About his story, “No Use Crying,” Venable says, “I considered it kismet that I saw IHLR’s PhotoFinish contest with its ekphrastic prompt at the same time I was caring for my aunt’s chickens. Seeing how relaxed the chickens were around my aunt when she showed me how to collect eggs compared to the anxiety and aggression the chickens showed when I tried the chore alone made me think of those who’ve lost loved ones. We’ve all known someone who left behind a pet stressed by the sudden change in ownership, but farm animals are rarely included in that list. There’s so much tension in the image of a broken egg; I wanted to capture that silent tension by comparing it to a recent, sudden loss.”

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VIVIAN WAGNER lives in New Concord, Ohio, where she’s an associate professor of English at Muskingum University. Her work has appeared in Slice Magazine, Muse/A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Gone Lawn, The Atlantic, Narratively, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Bending Genres, and other publications. She’s the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington); a full-length poetry collection, Raising (Clare Songbirds Publishing House); and three poetry chapbooks: The Village (Aldrich Press-Kelsay Books), Making (Origami Poems Project), and Curiosities (Unsolicited Press). About her poem, “Jamestown Redux,” Wagner writes, “I wrote this piece as I was reading about Jamestown and thinking how the origin story of that colony is reflected in many of the social and political issues that haunt us today. We haven’t left Jamestown behind, and until we solve its riddle, we won’t be able to move forward.”

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Iron Horse Literary Review would like to thank its supporters, without whose generous help we could not publish Iron Horse successfully. In particular, we would like to thank our benefactors and equestrian donors. If you would like to join our network of friends, please contact us at ihlr.mail@gmail.com for information on the various levels of support.

Benefactors ($300) Wendell Aycock Lon and Carol Baugh Bruce Clarke Beverly and George Cox Sam Dragga Madonne Miner Charles and Patricia Patterson Gordon Weaver Equestrian ($3,000 and above) TTU English Department, Chair Brian Still TTU College of Arts & Sciences, Dean Brent Lindquist TTU Graduate School, Dean Mark Sheridan TTU Provost’s Office, Provost Rob Stewart TTU President’s Office, President Lawrence Schovanec