Iowa Journal of Literary Studies

Reynolds, Jolene

Lemir

Notes on Contributors, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Petchler, Thea

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Darnell, Marc

OVER WATER
Marc Darnell
I’m halfway across the bridge.
The waves are dark 
and the current is fast.
Lights thin into knives on the surface. 
Water around the pillars below 
invites by funneling open.
But it’s time to move on.
Like singing about a dead thing too long, 
the decay in it hurts you after a while.
Maybe it was wrong 
to ever come on the bridge.
Soon I’ll be to the other side.
I see black trees there.
The trails of fallen leaves surely 
won’t lead to another bridge.
129


English

Over Water

Self-Portrait

Flanagan, Tim

TO BAJA CALIFORNIA
Tim Flanagan
On Revolution Avenue
In Tijuana, Mexico
there stands one striped burro
who drools on the shoes of her photographer,
dressed all in red and yellow.
With a stare so hollow she
seems not to see or feel
even the fly that shits on her eyeball,
she twitches an ear. That’s all.
It’s time I built a shack on my head
with beat-up billboards and orange crates,
so I need nails and a hammer
and Earth to stop rumbling
—Earth, stop rumbling—
so I can steady the nails.
The last thing I need is a thumb 
the size and color of a plum.
So help me God
when I get the shack built
and blood is streaming from my temples
the poor can come and live in it for free
and I will dig my heels into Earth
and brace myself between two trees
and stand there, a human cross,
until I grow too old and fall.
132


To Baja California

Erikson, Jill

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 9.1

Essex, David

VISITATION AT KILL DEVIL HILLS
David Essex
I had watched with the snake’s deaf 
fascination for the moving flute, 
as the spout’s tubeworm hulaed 
across the water, evolved upon landfall 
into a trunk, the rest of the celestial 
elephant somewhere up in the thunderhead. 
Live as a wire, haphazard sliced blindly 
across the island, flaying the Orville 
Motor Hotel, leaving the interior untouched, 
the beds neat as the maids could make them, 
mirrors and watercolor seascapes staring 
from theatrical flats.
In the cathedral-quiet aftermath, 
sound siphoned up to the silent sky, 
the phone poles and the high-tension lines 
were hung with spuncandy-pink insulation. 
Ambulance gumballs winked ‘Interesting . . .’ 
as they crept lightly among 
the dumbstruck lucky, who came out now, 
like night crawlers on a watered lawn. 
Barbecueing in the power outage, 
we talked of Oz and God’s macabre fondness 
for mystery, for the ambiguous object lesson. 
The tornado’s one fatality was a local lady 
who was reported, probably apocryphally, 
to have turned eighty that day. She’d done, 
we agreed, as any of us wisely might have, 
and still the freezer fell a thousand feet 
and found her huddled in the ditch.


Visitation at Kill Devil Hills

McIntosh, Sheila

Interview with Members of the International Writing Program

Not a member yet

Lemir

Notes on Contributors, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 10.1

Over Water

Self-Portrait

To Baja California

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 9.1

Visitation at Kill Devil Hills

Interview with Members of the International Writing Program

241

376