Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Hud

                                    In Jimmy’s Howe’s film, the man

                          

                                    ---call him cowboy, call him dead

                                    land, call him a flat, blinking sky--

                                    walked out of a bar clotted with

                                    violence, liquid, as the moon’s

                                    muscular pull.

                                    When he bent over, curved his

                                    hands, and scooped up from the

                                    horse trough,

                                    the mercurial water

                                                 --raw with the microbes of

                                     stagecoach and lever action repeating

                                    riffles--

                                    what he poured over him, couldn’t

                                    disinfect what he’d done, or wished

                                    to do

                                    Shall I cite the killing fields over

                                    which he ruled?

                                    The sky loomed [then].

                                    The sky loomed [now]

                                     a loom of infection—

                                                  --we are still weaving our

                                      passage out, calibrating the wings of

                                     the sparrows we will become --

                                     Forgiveness doesn’t grow in a dead

                                     land.

                                     Combined, my uterus, my fallopian

                                     tubes, my ovaries look like the skull

                                     of a dead steer.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is a poet, biographer, and scholar focused on amplifying women’s voices in the American West’s literary history. Her latest book, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (2024), is a USA Today bestseller, praised for its exploration of Babb’s life and her complex relationship with the Dust Bowl’s literary legacy. Dunkle holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and a PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of four poetry collections, including West : Fire : Archive, and curates the blog Finding Lost Voices, highlighting marginalized women writers. Dunkle has received fellowships from Biographers International, Millay Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in Orion, Electric Lit, Tin House, and Calyx. Dunkle is the Poetry and Translation Director at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference and serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.