IHLR NaPoMo Issue 2022 by Iron Horse Literary Review

IHLR NAPOMO’22

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Leslie Jill Patterson POETRY EDITOR

Geffrey Davis MANAGING EDITORS

Jacob Hall Sara Ryan Maeve Kirk Brook McClurg NaPoMo

2022

ASSOCIATE EDITORS TIMILEHIN ALAKE, DIVYA ALAMURI, EMMA AYLOR, WILLIAM BROWN, MCKENAN BUNDY, JAY CULMONE, TYLER FLESER, JENNESSA HESTER, TAYLOR JOHNSON, EMERSON KURDI, VICTORIA LARRIVA, MARCOS DAMIÁN LEÓN, WILLIAM LITTLEJOHN-ORAM, JENNIFER LOYD, JOSH LUCKENBACH, COURTNEY LUDWICK, LINDA MASI, BIBIANA OSSAI, ZACHARY OSTRAFF, MANISH PANDEY, CATHERINE RAGSDALE, SAM REBELEIN, NICOLAS RIVERA, HANNAH RUSSELL-CAMPOS, AND EMALEE SMITH.

COPYRIGHT © 2022 IRON HORSE LITERARY REVIEW. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. IHLR publishes three print issues and three electronic issues per year, at Texas Tech University, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department. For more information, visit www.ironhorsereview.com. COVER PHOTO: Leslie JIll Patterson IHLR COLOPHON: C Patterson Designer

National Poetry Month 2022

Foreword / LESLIE JILL PATTERSON

FINALISTS

4 6 10 12

Raptor Me / DANIEL EDWARD MOORE

Desire for Desire / CLAUDIA PUTNAM

Improvisation with Falling Stone / CARRIE BEYER

After the Phone Call / SAMANTHA DEFLITCH

14 17 22 28 32 38

En Route Mortality / SAMANTHA DEFLITCH

Epigenetics / CHRISTOPHER SHIPMAN

The House Where It Happened / CHRISTOPHER SHIPMAN Lost / ANNE-MARIE THOMPSON

Preservation / CRISTINA MEDINA

Zuihitsu of Georgia O’Keeffe in Dialogue with Mark Rothko’s Number 10 / HEIDI SEABORN

WINNER

Summer of the Oystercatchers / BRYANA JOY

MISCELLANY

48 54 57 58

From the Horse’s Mouth

In the Saddle

Around the Tracks

Contributors

bout a month ago, Paisley Rekdal, a poet I’ve long admired, began a Facebook thread: “I just read Harold Bloom’s The Art of Reading Poetry for research,” Rekdal wrote, “and that was astonishingly unhelpful.” I laughed, as her posts frequently cause me to do, and then I spent five minutes reading the equally witty responses from other writers:

JUSTIN MCBRIDE: “You need to take a drink each time [Bloom] mentions Shakespeare or the canon.” TONY EPRILE: “The bloom is off the Bloom.” LAWRENCE COATES: “I remember someplace where he writes, Shakespeare has a finer intelligence than mine . . . and you just know he was thinking but it’s close.” Literati legend—I don’t know what else to call it—depicts Harold Bloom reading 400-page books in an hour, gleaning every subtle nuance. Does this sound like a genuine way to interact with a text? All the way through grad school, I was asked to believe this white-male-genius tale, to trust the tradition that said Bloom was our most tremendous critic, that he read more deeply than the rest of us, that he should be our go-to-guy for learning (and teaching others) how to read. I personally think it more beneficial to spend an hour in solitude with a 40-line poem. Or to have spent a little over an hour at #AWP22 attending WINNING OVER THE HATERS: FOSTERING STUDENT APPRECIATION FOR POETRY, a panel organized by Jen Popa, and featuring Rekdal, Chen

Foreword

Chen, Tomás Q. Morin, and Lindsay Tigue. Yes, please, let’s ask the poets and poet-teachers how to best interact with poems and young students. For those asking, Well, if not Bloom, then who? Rekdal’s social media followers suggested Edward Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem (and Fall in Love with Poetry). And also Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry.” And I’ll add Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook and Katie Hartsock’s “Glucose Tablets,” recently published in IHLR 24.1: “You see something and think of something else,” Hartsock writes about the idea of generating poems. “Let the remembering begin, and end.” In this issue, the 2022 edition of IHLR’s annual NaPoMo assembly of poems, we give you this year’s $1,000 winner, Bryana Joy’s “Summer of the Oystercatchers,” and ten other finalists. We have poems here that speak to us about love and desire, youth and age, parenting and abiding parents, acquiescence and refusal. Adopting a multiplicity of means, these poets show us the many ways to get words and ideas on the page: whether by seeing something and thinking something else, as in Samantha DeFlitch’s poems; or by translating another writer’s words, as in Claudia Putnam’s “Desire for Desire” and Carrie Beyer’s “Improvisation with Falling Stone”; or by marrying the trifold pallet of a famous painting to an underused poetic form, as in Heidi Seaborn’s “Zuihitsu of Georgia O’Keeffe in Dialogue with Mark Rothko’s Number 10”; or by asking a question and demanding that your poem denies the answer, as in Joy’s winning poem. Here’s the thing: You wanna learn how to read poetry? Then read poetry. And a lot of it. If you wanna learn how to write poetry? Read poetry. And a lot of it. If you don’t enjoy reading—if you aren’t in fact a reader of your many contemporaries, if you aren’t supporting literary journals and publishers who give poets the platforms they need and deserve—then you should not call yourself a writer. You cannot hope to be the latter and refuse to be the former. The art of poetry lies in its ability to connect us—a gift Bloom denied poetry, saying it was rare and beautiful idealism to think poetry

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could help us communicate with one another. He was wrong. Poetry teaches us to climb and descend, to scale walls, to escape and enter, to be the ladder. Keep supporting your favorite poets and magazines and book publishers. Find new ones. Keep reading reading reading, and the writing and understanding will follow.

LESLIE JILL PATTERSON EDITOR

Foreword

DANIEL EDWARD MOORE

Raptor Me When lightning is about to flame, thunder clears its bearded throat and there I am in the church of drought waiting for a sermon from the hawk.

Prepare thyself for worship: the translucent blue sliced by feathers aimed at little things will humble you under acres of sky in the prison yard of plumage.

Prepare to be forgiven: observe how faith spreads its wings in case combustion strikes, setting a table for the never burned beside the always eaten.

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Finalist

Daniel Edward Moore

CLAUDIA PUTNAM

Desire for Desire Young women, their scent is different and better than that of middle-aged and older women. It’s as if desire and longing for desire have distinct and different odors. —Russell Banks

The forest clicks. Like a mouth with a swollen tongue. This is its sound now. It smells of must, as if it’s let itself go. Ferns, scrub oak crumbling at the brush of a hand, trousers. Rough on the bough, stem, not limp, rolled inward, withered. The air sucks at my cells, greedy as we are for what the forest holds, what walks in it.

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Finalist

Claudia Putnam

I have so little to give to this air. It is natural for forests to burn, for estrogen to abandon a woman, like water in a tide that will, like rain, not return. It is a natural phase of life, to be embraced, a prescribed burn, but I feel it as a death, systems shutting down, juice evaporating into the grasping air, like sap in these trees with moisture content now lower than kiln-dried lumber. Men, it’s said, can sense it in a woman, when raw desire is displaced by longing for desire, and so can you not, I ask you, men and women of Earth, feel this sucking drought in the air, dirt, trees? All my life I’ve turned to the woods. All my life they’ve loved me in return. Now neither of us can hold what the other desires.

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Improvisation with

Falling Stone CARRIE BEYER

the stone inside you still hasn’t hit bottom —Richard Siken, “Seaside Improvisation”

You taught me how a mouth desires to taste the smoothness of a neck. I remember giving you permission once, and then the stone began to drop. From the corner of my brain someone had forgotten to vacuum beneath a recliner. Ask me how I know this. I don’t expect you to notice plummeting or anticipate the sudden union as I have—gravel struck against the most tender of flesh, gravity sucking each to each. You point every sense toward me. I am prey. You, dog. How can I fault your obsession with my pelt, its gloss, how magnetic the surface of the ocean. Imagine the hunter creeps to your side, his tongue a sword, like God. Imagine he licks your belly to remove the stone.

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Finalist

Carrie Beyer

After the

Phone Call SAMANTHA DEFLITCH

I let the dog have whatever she’s been begging for to quiet her for a bit. My mother calls with her voice: You should still go to that party. It's what he would have wanted. The car drives itself to another perhaps. I do not go inside. I sit myself down on an upturned bucket on the front porch and make demands. Someone comes out and sits herself down beside me. The fog is lifting, or lowering. Down the street some dog takes up her howling and a man I once knew calls, asking if anything is true. I must be the one to tell him that yes, everything is true, and I am filled with meaningless motion: I am saying the prayers. I am making casserole. I am driving the car to work and home and putting the dog in her harness. I am here if you need to talk, someone says beside me on her own bucket on the front porch. An owl breaks open the night and I turn to face what will happen. Eventually, all bodies find themselves at the edge. Who will come for us there, wild deer dragging our third leg at the berm? When there are no more birds to hold it together, what will happen to the sky?

Finalist

Samantha DeFlitch

SAMANTHA DEFLITCH

En Route Mortality

I’ve asked for no more books on tape, so you’ve filled the empty space between us with coffee cups and drawn-out talk. You point to the exit when it appears, though I’m riding passenger-side and can’t do anything for your four wheels. Still, you pitch love across the center console— unnoticed and could-be unaware— speaking to the only miracle left on earth: the salmon run, fish flinging their bodies toward heaven; them the last bright flashes twisting against the sun. None of us make it out alive. Some of us go the jaw of a Kermode bear; others take the gossamer line tied to a wooly bugger fly. Some of us chance to build a redd in a riffle, cover our eggs with upstream gravel, and move along. What are my odds, I ask the kind specialist, of having a good body? He cannot say. I tell him that I have made the run seventy times over. He cannot say. This water is holy, and even the River Jordan empties itself into the Dead Sea, and the spawning run is the final miracle of the world, I say, but he has gone and left me on exam table paper. Outside, beyond and full of hope, the migration has again taken up its yowl. The yowl is the call of expectation,

Finalist

Samantha DeFlitch

belief that all this upstream push will make us holy, but we—cold below the ground of a city parking garage—have swallowed it in the throat. Too much hope deadens the miracle, you see. The fish only do their duty, capable things, as do the congregate bears at the edge. I say: Lord, make me capable, like a deer with its dragging leg, and determined. Look: the wide perhaps fades and our long drive home is the sound of chum salmon landed on dry rock, mouth full of psalm and gasp.

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CHRISTOPHER SHIPMAN AUTHOR NAME

Epigenetics Evidence suggests telling the story of trauma can create new trauma—even if the trauma or its story is not your own. I have to wade into this poem. Pants rolled to the knee. I have to be a river valley’s crooked silence mistaken for sound. To tell this story, I have to swim out to the middle of the river where the current rushes. I have to love the carnage of its spell. It’s easy to imagine my father’s past as a broad swath of alluvium— deposited from loss. Something left behind. Something

Finalist

Christopher Shipman

made from clay. Something that fell like silt through parted fingers on a massive hand. The other hand holding a folded map. I’m in the river now. Waist deep. I remind myself when water carves its memory into mud the remaining rock often endures fertile soil. I glance back to the bank I came from. A child that isn’t there sifts the sand that isn’t there. For anything to keep. It’s said children carry everything their parents have left unattended. There’re actions to take— the Internet says—tell the story. We say haunted to qualify wild eyes. And when we say our past comes back to haunt us our eyes are unmapped islands.

Untold stories. Ghosts stranded on corners of old streets with new names. They watch. They wait for words to lift their sheets. What strange bird is perched there to welcome me in? To what underworld? What skin beneath cut from newspaper clippings— blood the sins of what they tell about and what they don’t? My father’s and mine. His father’s and his. A catalog of sharks lost in a river. Today they’re all here. I’ve carried them into the river. I’ve gone chest deep. I’ve brought decades of newspapers folded into boats. Each gets a palm of sediment. Each is dragged back to the bank. There I shape them into things without memory— dead relatives and living. With no mother’s murder imprinted on their genes. Still, it’s said a river will never forget what is done.

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I don’t want my daughter to have to wade the waters of this dream. But if she must submit to the trauma of its crooked silence— says goodbye in a language of clay to a great-grandmother she never met (the ghost of a woman neither of us knew)— I’ll tell the story. Tell it delicately.

The House

Where It

Happened

CHRISTOPHER SHIPMAN

It’s cinematic—the house I have in mind. No romantic landscape. Not a home a painter might see from a distance passing it up the tenth time in provincial rain before shouldering the car to get a pic of its loneliness lit by sliver of sun. That house the painter’s eye knows the next drive will be gone—demolished in a day. Somehow this is known. What I see unfolds with a smell. Wild onions leaning where the lawn hems the sidewalk. Flank of edible flower clusters fainting since the moment of birth. My view is from the street they tilt toward, angling for me to come closer. But I’m not really there. And I have never been.

Finalist

Christopher Shipman

Beyond the onions I see anyway the grass needs mowing. Toys taken inside or piled on the porch before rain slants another sky. I wanted the house to be any easily imagined. A quick search on Google Maps. I wanted a picture of the first day of spring. A cheap painting reproduced on a FOR SALE sign still standing after a new family has settled in enough to worry about things like the lawn. Too many toys left out in too much rain. Wild onions. Not how to say before the murder—not to know what it means to say after. I wanted a house haunted only by the normal things. It must exist after the murder—let me start over. Let me just say I’ve always enjoyed that people often refer to levels of homes as stories rather than floors. Because floors are for dust. Spilled blood. Lifeless things thrown in corners. For measurements marking where one ends. Where the next begins, story sounds better than floor.

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The family after the murder—the house empty of victims—they deserve their own story. The home has only one story—that’s a good enough place to begin. To inch toward another end. And inside, people who sit sometimes on carpet rather than chairs if struck by a mood. Maybe to pet an aging dog. Trace a finger back and forth to invite the cat to do its acrobatics for visiting relatives. These are people who bathe babies in sinks. People who grieve deaths of people. People who make plans. College for their kids. A trip out west. The right wedding gift. People who step into the hall bathroom then into the tub—a hand flat against a robin-egg wall—the other lifting the window for it to fall at the first turn away. Now on their way to find something heavy to prop it up. Unconcerned if whatever it is will one day be used as a weapon, the family fights over forgotten bills. Fresh carton of eggs dropped. All of them broken.

Finalist

Christopher Shipman

I could do this all day. Describe every kid listening behind closed doors to music they aren’t allowed to love. Now a father who says, Listen to that bird whistling. It sounds so strange. So close. Like it’s inside. Like it wants me to say how strange it is. I wanted to begin this with a close-up of a lawn. An unlocked door. The innocent neighborhood noises surrounding an imagined family. No mention of a mother murdered. Not what sent the before into after. Not what it did to the kids—to their kids and to theirs. Somehow, I’ve entered the picture. Slipped in when the family wasn’t looking. There I am sprawled whistling on the lawn. It’s the first day of spring. I sip coffee from my favorite cup. Unconcerned with the smell of wild onions like I too am something beautiful. Like something that tells the imagined mother to tell the kids, No, just a strange man lounging on our lawn, when what she really means to say is Every story is a ghost story.

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ANNE-MARIE THOMPSON

Lost When Mama’s tabby cat ran away, something shifted, cosmic. It was as though she felt the expansion of the universe in her tiny bones, aching with Earth’s extending elliptics. This sounds hyperbolic, but she cried less at the deaths of grandparents. Because she thought it might leave a trail, home-scent leading homewards, she dragged a bedsheet down the street, calling, Here, Tippy, Tippy. This is not so much about

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Finalist

Anne-Marie Thompson

a breakdown as it is breaking down, as in taking apart, as in an idea. One piece: she teaches me to set a formal table, the placement of crystal goblets. Another: she corrects the grammar and usage of tenth-grade students, circling split infinitives, crossing through busted out. In the end, nobody cares, not even Mama, whether or not the blade faces inward, or whether the neighbors stare from respectable windows. In the end, it’s not a burst at all, but a slow pulling away: the planets acting on each other, changing incrementally their own orbits. They say Neptune and Uranus may have switched places. But all this was years ago, eons, long before we ever thought to look up into the darkness, before we realized how far away we’d gotten.

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CRISTINA MEDINA

Preservation I didn’t see my child

pulling petals off

the flowers

left on my nightstand.

I found them later

scattered across the carpet.

Stems trailed into corners

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Finalist

Cristina Medina

of the bathroom

where their bulbous heads

deflated into shallow puddles

and stopped breathing.

Too many times like this

grief was unannounced.

What I mean to say,

it was my child

streaked in pollen ash,

his unspoken confession.

I know this because

Finalist

Cristina Medina

I kill dandelions, too.

Dead gifts become extraordinary

in a little fist.

Memories pressed between pages

in a book.

Watch a yellow weed

become a silk butterfly.

A child knows to

pull petals—she loves me, she

loves me not.

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Zuihitsu of Georgia O’Keeffe

in Dialogue with

Mark Rothko’s

Number 10

HEIDI SEABORN

Define blue when flying through. Georgia O’Keeffe wrote, Such things as I have see I have never dreamed. Her blue, a meadow of clouds. Once I sponge painted my children’s nursery blue, imagining we’d live in the blue forever.

Back then, I listened to the blues of Sarah Vaughn. Her voice soundtracked every d baby bath, the slow stir of stew. It lingered each time I rocked my daughter back to Beyond the window, the hush of a sequined velvet night.

Years later, I’d see stars in the swimming pool of LA. I’d come to worship the blue sk knew one day I’d leave—had enough shimmer and glitter. Maybe I’d had enough *

en out this window

sky of that house

diaper change, o sleep.

ky, even as I blue.

Remember blue? I say to my love, the sky mustard. We have come to expect these bar the heat of August in Seattle, all that grows is dill weed and dandelion and yes, the blaz Somewhere near there is fire. When the sun sets hot pink, it trails gold streamers across the Sound.

Georgia O’Keeffe used burnt red, ochre, and gold to capture the striations of rock laye Ghost Ranch. In those cliffs, I’m told they found dinosaur remains but no gold.

I escape the smoke of Seattle to raft the Rio Grande. My sons, daughter, and I pinball o basalt rock fallen in a recent avalanche. We come off the rapids, hungry. With dinner, w Albariño and remember our life in Spain when it was a little more golden. Or was that LA *

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rbequed days. In ze of zinnias.

rs rising above

off we drink cold A?

An old woman at the next table wears silver bracelets to the elbows, necklaces to the b to wear gold, but now I wear silver. I used to dye my hair gold, now it’s ribboned with si say I’m done with ornamentation. Or I’ve come to distrust color. O’Keeffe says in the end, she painted beyond the actual colors.

Later, my daughter and I stargaze. Sky, the shiny silver of branzino we ate. I tell her abo her to sleep under night skies like this, but I am silenced by the North Star’s blue sheen.

Because a friend tells me that my recent poems often end in the night sky, this one won Nor will it end on our flight home to the Northwest’s burning edges as my daughter lean to watch the tarnished silver sky through the porthole. No, it ends the next day, back ho the weather’s turned cool, the late afternoon horizon—.

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breast. I used lver. Let’s

out lulling

n’t end here. ns across me ome,

Finalist

Heidi Seaborn

Summer of the

Oystercatchers BRYANA JOY

Every day that summer we circled the big lake in our shoes while the sun was going down slowly and the starlings were massing. In my hand your hand was a home fire I could carry with me and the geese snipping the grass next to their young. From the tops of the buildings, two oystercatchers nightly called for one another in their language of wide seas. O why is it anything that can love you back has skin full of veins and a beating heart that must stop beating?

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When I found one of them on the shore, its gorgeous lips parted and its wings stiff with mud, I did not tell you though a stone settled into my throat. I am asking why everything loveable is perishable. I am asking about the oystercatchers with their beautiful mouths. I am not going to accept any answer.

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Winner

Bryana Joy

FROM THE

Horse’s Mouth a conversation, with Bryana Joy, about the hidden power of the letter “O” and the auditory space we grant birds. IHLR: Thank you for talking to us about your winning poem, “Summer of the Oystercatchers.” We’re so happy to have the opportunity to expand upon your genesis statement. We feel like many will read this poem and recognize the current state of the world—all of the loss and our anxiety in the losing. How do you feel current events informed this poem and will perhaps continue to inform our reading of it? JOY: Although this piece doesn’t reference current events in any direct way, it is from start to finish a pandemic poem, and I always think of it as such. It’s easy to forget, I think, the eeriness—the quality of horror—that was so much an element of those early pandemic days. In England, where my husband Alex and I were living at the time, the world seemed to fall almost completely still for months. Grocery store aisles were bare, and businesses were hastily shuttered and deserted with promotional signs still dangling in the windows. It was a startlingly apocalyptic scene. Surgeries, cancer treatments, and other quite serious health procedures had to be suspended. I recall stepping out for a walk on campus one evening and not hearing so much as a single automobile. What’s more, folks were enduring unusually traumatic separations from loved ones. In Italy, bodies were piling up outside the morgues, and people were stuck in quarantine with the corpses of family members. All over the planet, couples were dying in isolation without being allowed to

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say goodbye even to one another. Alex and I, living an ocean away from our families and friends, and confined to a tiny studio apartment, were working hard to keep our spirits up and be there for one another, but I think there was always a nagging dread at the back of our minds: What if we get separated by this virus? What if this is our last week/month/ year together? And those questions followed us around throughout the whole spring and summer of 2020, shaping the nature of our interactions and making each day feel sort of terrifyingly beautiful—because we didn’t know how long we had. And, of course, we still don’t, because no one ever does know that. IHLR: When we first read this poem, we were drawn to the singular “O” at the end of the fourth stanza. This “O” is hard to find in contemporary poems but evokes a unique yearning and exclamatory sonic moment that we found so satisfying. Could you talk about your choice to use “O” in this poem? JOY: Absolutely. The “O” in this poem is of particular importance to me since it marks the transition by which the speaker passes from relishing the unique beauty and camaraderie of the oystercatchers to lamenting a particular instance of their transience. I wanted a transition word that could bear the weight of immense, shattering grief, and I see the singular “O” as a distinctly different word from the more common “Oh,” which is visually, if not always auditorily, softened by the addition of the “h” and brought to a natural close. To me, “Oh” is a word with a definite end, but “O” is more unlimited—a sound as opposed to a word. I think it invites the possibility of something like infinitude, a grief that reverberates. IHLR: We loved the strangeness in parts of this poem, specifically the lines where you personify the oystercatchers by noting “their gorgeous lips” and “beautiful mouths.” Could you talk about the choice to humanize these animals? JOY: I’ve been interested in birds, birding, and ornithology since childhood, and that interest has grown exponentially over the past several years as I’ve developed fond rela-

From the Horse’s Mouth

tionships and associations with local communities of birds both here in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and in England. When Alex and I were living in lockdown without any other human interaction, it was of course natural that the wildlife we repeatedly saw on our daily walks should take on expanded personalities for us, and I certainly wanted the poem to reflect the strong personal attachment I felt to this pair of birds, whose ardent connection to one another aroused all my sympathies at a time when global events made connections between living things seem especially frail. But, perhaps of equal significance, birds have recently also begun to fill a symbolic role for me in my exploration of a subject that has been tough to examine and tougher to speak up about: women’s liberation. I’m a third-culture kid who grew up in Turkey, and my childhood and young adult years were shaped by my involvement in and adjacence to Islam and conservative Christian evangelicalism (both white and otherwise). Although I don’t believe religion is necessarily the primary source of the global phenomenon of gender apartheid, the subjugation and abuse of women can be particularly insidious and pronounced in conservative religious circles, and these abuses have touched my life at multiple points. Over the past three years, I’ve spent a significant amount of time and emotional energy studying and processing how norms for gender socialization push women toward silence and dependence. Rather unexpectedly, in my attempts to give a creative voice to my findings, I’ve noticed myself turning again and again to bird imagery as a kind of counterweight to the suppressive gender expectations women around the world tend to labor under. I’m drawn, for example, to the independence implied by wings. And I’m absolutely fascinated by beaks and birdsong, and the way birds are permitted and expected to make noise, to take up auditory space—behaviors that are so often discouraged in women, especially in religious circles. IHLR: We noticed that this poem hinges on its sense of place—a lake, the buildings the oystercatchers call from, the oystercatchers themselves—and you note that this poem draws upon your time in an unfamiliar place. What is the importance of place in your poetry—in

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this poem and in others? How do you think place changes how we immerse ourselves in poems and how we read them? JOY: I’m glad you brought this up, because place is certainly nestled right in the middle of my creative impetus, and it’s a subject I’m always excited to explore. My life has been shaped by travel and relocation since childhood, and as of this writing, I’ve lived in seventeen different houses on three continents. When I was a young teenager, I remember telling a friend I was pretty sure I had more strong attachments to places than to people, and that may still be true—not because I don’t cherish my connections with human friends and family, but simply because the number of locations that have left lasting marks on the course of my life is unusually high for someone my age. I wouldn’t trade my wandering history for anyone else’s deeply rooted existence, but one reality about cross-cultural living is that you end up with these deep wells of yearning sort of drilled into your psyche. Everywhere you go, you find yourself almost unbearably hungering after some other place that you’ve left behind. And then there’s this persistent inability to properly “belong” anywhere. In each place that homes you, you’re a newcomer, struggling to decode new norms and new rules for social engagement. For me personally, poetry has proved an effective outlet for managing some of these tensions: it allows me to imaginatively immerse myself in my memories of a particular place and actively honor its impact on my understanding by figuring out how to share it with readers who know nothing about it. In 2018, I began writing poetry about my childhood and teen years in Turkey as a way of telling the funny, sad, joyful, and highly irregular stories that were eating me up inside because their dependence on places so unfamiliar to my American friends made me feel I had no way to share them. I wrote poems about my life in the remote Black Sea village of Belen Köy. I wrote about the details of Turkish holidays and wedding customs. I wrote about the beautiful and the terrible things I had seen: the fruiting orchards of golden light, the fountainous hospitality of neighbors, the cruel misogyny, the crushing poverty. I wrote about mandalinas. And seeing these poems published in ten different literary magazines and online journals over the past three years has not dissolved but has certainly mitigated the

From the Horse’s Mouth

sense of loneliness that came from carrying unspoken stories around inside me. I know my poetry isn’t going to be able to supply my readers with a fully immersive experience of the unfamiliar places I’m writing about, but I hope my writing conjures an inhabitable place of some kind in their imagination, even if it’s not exactly the place that exists in the real world. And I know that my fervent love for my own places has certainly expanded my capacity to “enter” the places other poets open up for me with the strength of their words. IHLR: We love the ending lines of this poem, and their stern and unwavering tone: “I am / not going to accept any answer.” What does this line mean to you? Why did you choose to end on this firm sentiment, rather than perhaps something more hopeful or comforting? JOY: I admit the ending has something of a bleak quality about it, but I think I must put in a word here for the hope that can be specifically implied by some of the bleakest language. For example, I am terribly fond of Dylan Thomas’s infamous villanelle, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” and I confess I derive something rather like hope from that great poem’s feisty rejection of death: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” Thomas’s speaker enjoins his dying father. While this command certainly sounds like a bitter exercise in futility, I find something gemlike and inherently meaningful in the sense of wounded outrage with which humans tend to confront annihilation. In the final stanza of my poem, my speaker (who is me) wrestles with some of those daunting why questions that so regularly trouble the human experience. However, instead of settling on an answer to either lament or take comfort in, she chooses to resist framing the question of life and death in why terms. I have a strong antipathy toward existential “quick fixes,” and I feel that many well-meaning attempts to ease the agony of human loss in the face of death serve only to subtly undermine the value of our connections to other living things. Comfort which implies that our loss was not truly shattering, not truly disastrous, is cold comfort to me, and my speaker wants to honor the significance of love by refusing to treat death as an acceptable outcome. I think this can mean different things to different folks, but for me personally, it means hope.

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I am, all told, a Christian, although I increasingly feel the need to attach a disclaimer to this avowal given the highly ungenerous behavior, attitudes, and beliefs that have become associated with my creed. In recent years, I find myself speaking not of “Christianity” but of “Christianities,” as the singular word is an umbrella under which folks gather who would not be able to find even one statement of values on which they can agree. But I digress. At its core, my Christian faith is predicated on the story of Death getting mystically trounced by a God who puts on human skin and fragility in order to share in the sufferings of humankind. Christians have historically interpreted the significance of this story in different ways, at times placing emphasis on global renewal and at other times placing emphasis on the resurrection of the body, but one idea that has remained more or less constant is the old Christian image of Death as permanently worsted in a match with the Divine. And this image certainly permeates my approach both to living and to art.

—SARA RYAN, column editor

From the Horse’s Mouth

In the Saddle with

JASMINE V. BAILEY

3 7 6 6 8

photo by Stephen Grant

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Jasmine V. Bailey has published one chapbook (Sleep and What Precedes It, winner of the Longleaf Press Chapbook Prize) and two poetry collections (Alexandria and Disappeared, both with Carnegie Mellon University Press). Last November, Carnegie Mellon also released her first translated book, That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove by Silvina López Medin. Jasmine’s poems cover a range of sobering topics— political erasure, grief, war, sexual desire, free will, the desolation of American suburbs, etc.—and still, her sense of humor sings. It’s a powerful blend: the willingness and vision to find joy and laughter in life’s most pensive moments. We’re thrilled that Jasmine has allowed us into her studio space, giving us a look at her unique process. It’s no surprise to see the space is filled with both a poet’s labor and her beguiling wit. —LESLIE JILL PATTERSON, column editor

Desk from a garage sale in Lubbock. The varnish is wearing thin, but anything that fits in this space is a keeper. My husband, Dan, and I call this office the “Mrs. Rochester Room”: it’s not exactly where we keep our nice stuff, and it’s narrow, unfinished, and hidden from the rest of the house, behind the basement. At the moment, nothing happens here except writing, but maybe one day, my husband or I will imprison the other one there. Snake plant in attractive planter from Marshalls. Snake plants might not actually be plants—because this one lives with almost no water or light. It might not even be mortal. Allegedly, they detoxify the air, which is good, since this room gets no air. THE MAXIMUS POEMS by Charles Olson and THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES, translated by Everett Fox. Olson was from Gloucester, Massachusetts, where we live now, and set his epic, incomprehensible work in Gloucester. I'm encouraged to imagine I will someday complete my own epic, incomprehensible work. This, along with the Torah, reminds me it's better not to make too much sense.

In the Saddle

Scrabble, Lord of the Rings Risk, Arkham Horror, Apples to Apples on the Go! and Poker. Because Dan and I dream of a day when our daughter will be old enough to play complicated, multi-hour cooperative role-playing board games—or just be able to spell.

Ancient award. Given to me by the Syracuse Y on the occasion of my first book. It stands in front of dozens of unsold copies of that book.

Painting Dan bought in Brazil. I am not hugely fond of this painting, so I put it here because marriage is about compromise.

Three-hole punch. I guess we bought this before we learned about digitizing. I no longer remember what we were thinking.

8 Jewish calendar. Because a girl's got to work for a living, and I work at a synagogue.

Curly hair. Evidence of a mischievous child. Between work and loving on/ caring for/cleaning-up after/providing unwanted and ignored guidance on all aspects of life to the curly-haired child, I have little free time or energy to write. But a couple of months ago, when copies of my new book of translation arrived at our house, my husband took one and showed her my picture on the back of the book and explained that I wrote it. Then she looked at me, smiled, and tackled me. It was the first time in her life I was ever sure she felt proud. So, I make time.

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Jasmine V. Bailey (former IHLR managing editor) won the 2020 VanderMey Nonﬁction Prize, hosted by Ruminate, for her essay “Destiny of Cumin.” She received $1,500, and her essay will be published in Issue 54. Brianna Van Dyke judged. Bruce Bond (5.1) won the 2020 Juniper Prize in Poetry for his collection Patmos. He received $1,000, and University of Masschusetts Press will publish his book.

Stephanie Dickinson (2.2) won the 2020 Library of Poetry Award for Blue Swan, Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries. She received $1,000. Her collection will be published by Bitter Oleander Press.

Gail DiMaggio (18.6 and 19.1) won the 2021 Passager Poetry Prize for a group of poems. She received $1,000, and her poems were published in Issue 71 of Passager.

Around

the Tracks

Carolyn Oliver (21.2) won the 18th annual Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize for “Reading Szymborska Under a Harvest Moon.” She received $500, and the poem was published in the summer 2020 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review. Black Lawrence Press will release H.R. Webster’s debut poetry collection, What Follows, in June 2022. Also Webster’s IHLR poem, “My Mother Says I’m Going to Flush the Toilet Now” (23.2), was featured on Verse Daily on February 9, 2022. This was the 35th appearance of IHLR poets on Verse Daily.

Around the Tracks

Contributors JASMINE V. BAILEY is the author of Alexandria, Disappeared, That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove (translated from Silvina López Medin’s original Spanish), and the chapbook Sleep and What Precedes It. She is the winner of Michigan Quarterly Review’s Lawrence Goldstein Prize and Ruminate Magazine’s VanderMey Nonﬁction Prize. For more about her writing process, see this issue’s IN THE SADDLE, pp. 54-56.

CARRIE BEYER grew up in rural Kansas and currently lives near Seattle, where she is a mother of three school-aged children. She holds an MFA in Writing from Paciﬁc University and received a fellowship for the 2022 Jack Straw Writers Program. Her poems have been published in Apeiron Review and Prairie Schooner. Beyer says “Improvisation with Falling Stone” emerged in conversation with Richard Siken’s poem “Seaside Improvisation” from his collection Crush: “I realized that Siken’s poem made me angry—the way his speaker is overly conscious of his awkward hands and how he instructs his lover: ‘Imagine surrender. Imagine being useless.’ In my poem, I wanted to give voice to the signiﬁcance of guardedness, a result of having experienced sexual trauma. I invite the falling stone to carve out the speaker’s internal space on her own terms as she imagines the possible scenarios of intimacy.”

SAMANTHA DEFLITCH is the author of Conﬂuence (Broadstone Books, 2021). A National Poetry Series ﬁnalist, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, The Missouri Review, Appalachian Review, and On the Seawall, among

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others. She is a recipient of fellowships and awards from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and the University of New Hampshire, where she completed her MFA. She lives in New Hampshire with her corgi dog, Moose. When asked about the origins behind her two poems in this issue, DeFlitch noted they each draw from similar concepts and imagery: “‘En Route Mortality’ and ‘After the Phone Call’ make use of shared motifs—the deer with its dragging leg, the howl and yowl—to explore the concept of the edge. These poems both take place at the edge, and I’m working with natural imagery and concepts to better understand what it means for a human body to ﬁnd itself here, in a place between hope and no hope. ‘En Route Mortality’ reﬂects the experience of living with endometriosis and chronic pain, and the speaker demands a capable body, aligning herself with the salmon and bears who simply do their duty. ‘After the Phone Call’ is also a poem about the edge-place of hope and its absence, and was written after the death of a close friend. I see an enormous amount of tonal overlap between these poems, and although their occasions differ, they feel in dialogue with each other as they seek to understand how to inhabit this shared space.”

BRYANA JOY is a writer, poet, and painter who works full-time sending illustrated snail mail letters all over the world. She also mails new poems to subscribers in a monthly postal poetry project called Puzzle Pieces. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in over three dozen literary journals, including Midwest Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Delmarva Review, and others. She has lived in Turkey, England, and East Texas, and currently resides in the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania. Find her at www.bryanajoy.com or on Twitter and Instagram at @_bryana_joy. Joy’s poem, “Summer of the Oystercatchers,” is the winner of our 2022 NaPoMo Competition. Her piece drew inspiration from the natural world in the midst of great uncertainty: “Oystercatchers are eye-catching shorebirds, waders with ﬂame-colored beaks longer than their faces, stark black-and-white plumage, and a piercing soprano call. My husband and I ﬁrst encountered these

Contributors

startling creatures during our year in England, where we grew attached to a pair of them that passed time on the lake next to our ﬂat throughout the long summer in lockdown. It was a frightening time. The headlines brought only sad news, and we were stuck for months in a small studio where we watched live-streamed videos of Black Lives Matter protests and kept refreshing the pandemic stats page on Worldometer. This poem tells a small true story from that season of anxious proximity to Death, who sends the chill into each bone but sometimes wears Love on his wrist like a broad-winged bird.” For more about Joy’s winning poem, see our interview with her in this issue’s FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH, pp. 48-53.

CRISTINA MEDINA writes and teaches in Los Angeles. Her poems and essays have appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Lunch Ticket, and others. Medina says her poem, “Preservation,” has strong roots in some of her childhood memories: “I remember seeing a tapestry of dandelions spreading across my grandfather’s acreage, and my first desire was to pick them apart for my mother. I write poems about my children to return to the child, to return to the first instinct of attachment. I gave my mother a bouquet of flowers, but she didn’t take them, and they wilted and died. Writing ‘Preservation’ was written as an act of love.”

DANIEL EDWARD MOORE lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems are forthcoming in The Cape Rock, Lily Poetry Review, Ponder Review, Notre Dame Review, Front Range Review, Ocotillo Review, and The Headlight Review. His book, Waxing the Dents, was a ﬁnalist for the Brick Road Poetry Prize and was published in 2020. His recent book, Psalmania, was a ﬁnalist for Four Way Books’ Levis Prize in Poetry. When asked to talk about the origin story behind “Raptor Me,” Moore drew attention to how his physical surroundings sparked some of the ideas and central concepts his poem circles around: “Living on Whidbey Island, at the farthest corner of America, is both a literal and metaphorical edge for me. Here, the

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presence of ocean, prairie, and wilderness combine to create a surreal shadow from a literal paradise. And part of that is the predatorial beauty of eagles. It’s very easy for me to become numb, in a way, to being a citizen of “Eden,” which is why inwardly I find myself turning upon, with all my talons extended, the rich and perverse Biblical history which I adore and disdain. For me, the poem reflects the undeniable connection between aspects of power: the servant and the served, disciple and messiah, and explores the way nature’s magnificence is portrayed in our culture as an emotional sedative, when really there’s no pain being relieved, only one more victim in history’s beak, glorifying death in a world that ends up being sold in velvet paintings.”

CLAUDIA PUTNAM lives in western Colorado, where she is a craniosacral therapist working on a limited basis (she is disabled) with humans and animals. Her debut collection, The Land of Stone and River, won the Moon City Press Poetry Award and came out in early 2022. A long personal essay, Double Negative, won the 2021 Split/Lip Press Nonfiction/Hybrid Chapbook Contest and was released in March 2022. She has had a few residencies, including the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy. Her poem, “Desire for Desire,” is part of Putnam’s newest creative endeavor, a chapbook entitled Firewise: “I was so grateful for the privacy and focus (and good juju) provided by my 2021 solo residency at Hypatia-in-the-Woods, amid the rainforest along the Puget Sound. I have been on standby several times due to wildfire and was once evacuated for five days while 169 of my neighbors’ homes burned. In the fall of 2019, a devastating fire closed Colorado’s Glenwood Canyon, shutting down I-70 for weeks. In this poem, I was trying to get at a couple of things that seemed to be burning during those times. First, the air itself, which during a wildfire turns an eerie orange, reaching all the way to the ground. It so exactly matches the way most of us probably imagine the Last Days of the planet’s ability to support human life. My marriage too was struggling for air as my husband explored his attraction to another woman. I had just been told I was no longer a candidate for hormone replacement therapy. So, yay, I got to go through menopause again! During the Hypatia retreat, Russell Banks’s latest novel

Contributors

came off hold at the library. His book is mostly about male aging, but in the epigraph I used, he seems to be, as was my husband, pinning much of male agingrelated dysphoria on women. I am grateful to Iron Horse for choosing to publish this poem as it does not end on a particularly hopeful note. Nor does it do what I see in so much poetry about climate change lately, which is to treat anxiety about the looming apocalypse glancingly, as a sort of background hum. What I desire most is that the inhabitants of Earth will wake up to their own desire for the solace of nature and do what will be necessary to preserve what we still can.”

HEIDI SEABORN is the author of An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (winner of the PANK Poetry Prize), the acclaimed debut Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks (winner of Comstock Review’s Chapbook Award). She has recent work in Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Diode, Financial Times of London, The Missouri Review, The Offing, The Slowdown, and The Washington Post. Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and holds an MFA from NYU. You can learn more about her work by visiting heidiseabornpoet.com. Seaborn’s poem, “Zuihitsu of Georgia O’Keeffe in Dialogue with Mark Rothko’s Number 10,” weaves together numerous conceptual threads, and she drew inspiration for the poem from several sources: “The poem started at the MOMA in New York in late July 2021. In the city for a couple of readings and signings, I treated myself to a morning at the museum. When I stood in front of Rothko’s Number 10, it reminded me of the horizon in front of my Seattle home during the summer wildfires. I snapped a photo, knowing it had already taken up residence in my brain. A couple weeks later, I traveled to New Mexico with my grown children. We visited Georgia O’Keeffe’s museum, Ghost Ranch, rafted the Rio Grande, and stargazed. On the flight home, the strands of the poem started tufting in my mind: the Rothko, O’Keeffe, the wildfires, my children, my environmental anguish. I knew I wanted to write an ekphrastic about the Rothko, putting language to the multiform color blocks of that painting. So that intention propelled the poem. Then, as I had been writing in the zuihitsu form quite a bit, I drafted it as a zuihitsu. I kept it there as it seemed like the right container for this

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poem, allowing me to hold all these different images and sentiments in conversation with each other.”

CHRISTOPHER SHIPMAN is a poet, teacher, and drummer living in Greensboro, North Carolina. His work has appeared in Cimarron Review, PANK, Pedestal, Plume, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. He is the author or coauthor of five books and four chapbooks. His poem “The Three-Year Crossing” was the winner of a Motionpoems Big Bridges Prize (2015), judged by Alice Quinn. A Ship on the Line (2015), co-authored with Vincent A. Cellucci, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. His experimental play Metaphysique D’ Ephemera has been staged at four American universities. Learn more about his work at www.cshipmanwriting.com. Two of Shipman’s poems appear in this issue, both of which grapple with his own family history: “The genesis of these poems,” he writes, “began with the murder of my paternal grandmother—no, everything that led to that moment and everything after. Artie May Shipman was a woman I never met. She was killed by her brother-in-law, with a brick that propped up her bathroom window, when my father (one of her seven children) was eleven years old. At the time, her husband (the murderer’s brother) was serving a prison sentence in Texas for domestic abuse, among other crimes. It took a long time for me to reconcile my own difficult upbringing with that of my father and his nuclear family. I have always gravitated toward personal relationships and lived experience as the heart’s core of my work, but I had purposefully avoided wading into the fog of family issues informed by this specific trauma and the mess left in its wake until, like anything that demands a poet’s attention, it sprang up before me as a kind of fever dream. For whatever reason—who can say why—it was time for me to confront this narrative. The poems published here are part of the result of me telling a story that, as is true for any stories living within us, is perpetually reborn into myth.”

ANNE-MARIE THOMPSON is the author of Audiation, selected by Marilyn Nelson for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pearson’s Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing and published in

Contributors

Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, and other journals. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband and son. The first lines of Thompson’s poem, “Lost,” motion toward some of the personal experiences that have found their way into this piece: “Years ago, my mother did drag a sheet around our neighborhood to try to find her lost cat. I often wondered if her hugely out-of-character actions were as baffling to her as they were to the rest of us. Words, too, can baffle the speaker or, in this case, the writer: I wrote this poem two months before we found out my mother had fourth-stage lung cancer, and three months before she died.”

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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 Beverly and George Cox Sam Dragga Madonne Miner in memory of Charles Patterson Gordon Weaver Equestrian ($3,000 and above) TTU English Department, Chair Brian Still TTU College of Arts & Sciences, Dean Michael San Francisco TTU Graduate School, Dean Mark Sheridan TTU Provost’s Office, Provost Michael Galyean TTU President’s Office, President Lawrence Schovanec

IHLR NaPoMo Issue 2022

Articles inside