Marriage Lesson: Wormhole
If air could bend [gymnastic] create pockets between–
Would it xerox the past? Would desire rustle across the page?
The robot believes we need moon boots [weighted].
This type of transportation requires ballast.
Have you put on your proper suit? The robot, beyond fashion,
refuses to react. I am my suit. She says.
[Have I told you how much I wish to be the robot?]A wormhole is all-consuming. How to know [Tarot predicts]
the other side.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West : Fire : Archive will be published by Mountain/ West Poetry Series in 2021. Her other 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 biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer is forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press. Her poem “Listening to the Caryatids on the Palace of Fine Arts” poem will be featured on 100 buses as part of the San Francisco Beautiful and Poetry Society of America Muni Art 2020 campaign. Her works have been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review, Taos Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.