The Iowa Review

Malech, Dora

the iowa review 51
Notes Toward a Thank You
Illegible ledger scrawled on the walls 
of the mind’s interior, unseen but seen to 
and shaping as a place makes nexus 
of the prior and the next,
its grace suspended in an amber 
chamber, praises pressed as flowers 
in chapters of rising action and falling, 
expressed in the rising and falling 
of the sleeping chest after endurance—
you can have the rest—or ink if we take 
cardstock manners over mind 
and think to thank indelible.
Excess can be gratitude, as can 
restraint. I left some
pastry on your porch. I left 
some flowers in a former marinara jar. 
I don’t expect you to keep them forever.
I don’t expect them to keep. I took 
a roadside spectrum out of context, 
ditch lilies whose unfurling says:
can’t help ourselves from blooming
so please help yourselves 
to us too. This bursting at as if all else 
were seams, field sown to open, 
reveling in its unraveling.
Earlier I felt past try, I felt flow errs,
but routine is a route in—I stand by it.
Tangled in lines rapt in the net,
votive’s motive meaning now’s avowal,
and the dough risen to as if today 
were the occasion, something 
still sweeter at its center.
These poems incorporating the theme of gratitude were written in celebra-
tion of The Englert Theatre in Iowa City and read at the October 2014 
event “Celebrating Local: 10 Years of the New Englert.”


English

Notes Toward a Thank You

McSweeney, Joyelle

10 joyelle mcsweeney
[To lie down in still waters of erasure]
To lie down in still waters of erasure,
rinsed in noise. Static from old landlines
debrides the air, plastic phones in dumps
revise their toxic compositions. 300 feet
rise from the factory roof, 150 souls
are exported from Earth ahead of schedule.
Phone rings, wrist lifts, eustachian fluid tilts, 
a vector communicates, one cell
answers, one white note 
folds up in soft tissue. O when 
will it come to light? My medium
is air, O lung, I am your morbid bride
in white veil, white wreath, white cerements,
a flower, a novice, and an infiltrate.


[To lie down in still waters of erasure]

the iowa review 9
[With my spittle, with my cipher]
With my spittle, with my cipher
I roam the Martian surface. I’m a rogue,
alone, a venial rover. I tap a vein. 
Wind lifts, rides, wrecks nothing. Threshers
lie down tangled in their tresses,
trestles, mattocks, manglers, cloaks, felts,
fustians, reapers, gleaners, because it’s  
Fall. The season of decay. The sleepers
make room in the grave. In my tread,
I tote a grain, a mite, contaminants 
to subdivide and eat this fascia clean of life
and featureless for ever. Deep Trench,
abide. As earthly glaciers
lie down in still waters of erasure.


[With my spittle, with my cipher]

Davis, Isabelle

164
isabelle davis
Maybe Flowers Would Grow Soon 
I like to walk.1 This comes from my mom. Her legs are longer than mine, but when we walk together they do not cover more area than mine do. I know this must be some type of magic, miracle, result-
ing from our closeness. I first discovered it in the sixth grade when we 
hiked together in Wyoming, in Yellowstone, and our feet fell next to 
each other at every step.
When people, my mom, me, get upset, walking is sometimes the only 
answer. Things will seem especially wrong and we will put down our 
wine. This always means trouble, to put down our wine. We pull out the 
leash. We say, Come on, Commiskey. He gets very excited, running around 
the house, jumping into our laps. My mom likes to walk for miles when 
the winter finally ends.2 We walk in the bright, bright sun and we do 
not bring any sunglasses, we let it hit our eyes. We let it in. A horrible-
ness lifts when the tops of our heads warm up, and then our shoulders, 
and then the rest.
It is hard to pretend that seasonal depression does not affect you when 
you are already sad, sensitive, crumbling at the touch. 
Winter lasts years3 and then it is over.4
1. you & i had been walking all day but this was different. this was cleaner. our first 
mistake was to think things would be simple on the beach that day. we should have 
known better. but we have the same favorite sound: waves crashing when it is very 
quiet & we put our bags where the ice had already melted & dried &
2. maybe flowers would grow soon.
3. we have just done the math & discovered that we have been together for twenty-
one months. i say our relationship could have a drink & you say no, you say our 
relationship is a baby. we are just those parents who look at this perfect little baby they 
have somehow brought into a world they do not feel is ready for it yet & refer to this 
life in months. the baby is two. 
4. when i talk to m. about you i refer to it as an unreal amount of time. a surreal 
amount of time. she has just broken up with her boyfriend because he became apa-
thetic & i tell her the truth: i cannot imagine an ending to this but sometimes it ap-
pears in dreams & i wake up so cold.
the iowa review 165
Men do not say anything to me when I walk with my mom. They look, 
but this is different because I am very good at blocking out, at being 
oblivious to, attention of any quiet variety. Today I am walking alone; 
my mom cannot always come to meet me simply for a walk. We do not 
live together anymore.5
When I am alone they tell me they like my body like popsicles on their 
tongues, or are imagining me with a popsicle on my tongue. Girls don’t 
say anything, that’s safer, that’s the way to not get hurt. Winter6 has 
just ended, I am the first woman they have seen in a skirt without tights 
this year. I am all bare legs. I am newly shaven. They want to know if I 
need a sample, or any help out of this outfit. I wish I was no longer wear-
ing it, the skirt, my skin, but neither falls off me the way I hope it will.
I am not sure if I was born to be very small or if they, men, men like 
this, made me this way.
I am trying to take up more space with my mouth. My body7 is not very 
intimidating, but I am learning how to manipulate other factors. I do 
not know how to be quiet unless I am being degraded.
Once a man came up to us at the beach, B. and me. He came up to us 
and said he had seen us kissing earlier. That it had been beautiful. It 
had been, but that is not the point. He made a shadow over my sun 
while we were reading poetry and he offered to pay us money, to buy us 
dinner, for a picture of that moment. Before then, my harassment had 
always happened as I walked, it had always been a passing moment, 
there and then, easily, not. Queerness takes away that simplicity. It 
5. sometimes when i look at you i feel a sudden need to become a blanket. you laugh 
because i am always trying to cling to you but i am really just keeping you warm. i am 
really just giving you my heat. it was like that on the beach, with the bunny.
6. someone else had found it before you, & they had wanted to keep it warm. they 
had draped it in a baby blanket.
7. the body is too far away, stuck on ice that wants so badly to slip, melt into the 
water, to touch with our hands, but you want to put the little body into the lake. i say 
won’t it be cold? & you say that doesn’t really matter anymore. you ask me to stay with our 
backpacks while you search for something to push the bunny into a resting place. you 
find a stick you think will help the bunny & you stretch & stretch until we both know 
that your limbs are not as long as mine. until i have stood up to take the stick out of 
your hands, gently gently. the only way i know how.
166 isabelle davis
makes me more vulnerable,8 strangely approachable, in a way I had not 
been before.
People continue to approach and ask us for favors. To be our third. To 
join in. To get some of that. For us to please not stop doing what we are 
doing. When we do stop, I hope it hurts them because I am stopping B. 
from breaking9 noses.
I do not tell my mom about this sort of thing. She does not understand 
me, my queerness, even though she tries. She worries that it will hurt 
me to be un-straight, it will make the world10 so much harder to get 
through when I am dating not-men. She worries it will negatively affect 
my life, and I have no way of explaining that it does and it does not. That 
it lets me take a hammer to things she will never want to take a hammer 
to; that that is both good and bad for me. That it is just me. 
I have learned, so quickly, my own strength, since realizing my sexu-
ality. This is because there is only a certain amount of degradation a 
person can take before they notice that it is happening, that it is not flat-
tery, but dangerous. After that realization, we get angrier and tenderer 
all at once. Raw.
Girls don’t say anything, that’s safer, that’s the way to not get hurt.
But I bought pepper spray a year ago. I bought it and put it in my 
purse the way I would put a cookie in my purse, gingerly, so it did not 
crumble.11 I will not have to say a word to use it. I will just have to feel 
adequately threatened.
8. i have to straddle on ice to touch the stick to the tiny body, to the blanket over it. 
& i nudge until i feel the weight of resistance.
9. weight which once lived. it was too much.
10. when i put the stick down, my hand shakes & it slides into the lake so easily. right 
past the bunny in its blankie. when we hear it hit the water, everything in me needs 
to get out.
11. we hold hands over the bunny. over the ridge of ice the bunny will not move from. 
we stand & hold hands the way we have seen people do these things at funerals in 
movies, as if we are praying together. neither of us knows what it is to pray but your 
hand is warm & mine is cold & together this makes some sort of balance. people and 
rabbits have loved you, we will continue to love you. you said that while i tried not to cry 
again & i know
the iowa review 167
Central Illinois is different from Chicago. Corn grows everywhere. My 
mom grew12 there, the way plants do, seemingly slowly, but when she 
compares pictures, things have changed so much. In this way, things 
were not so different there. But she learned things differently, like how 
to deal with men. She learned because her stepfather treated her moth-
er, my grandmother, like an object until she punched him in the jaw.
I have never hit anyone but I have thought about it. I have thought about 
that scene in Heathers where Winona Ryder lights her cigarette with 
Christian Slater’s exploding body. My mom told me for the first time 
about the punch after my grandmother had already died. She told me 
when I came home crying about a boy who made my insides a type of 
fire that I could not identify as good or bad. She told me so I knew that 
I had options; so I knew other things too. 
I have always been given the impression that I am my own.13
12. what we are doing will stay in present tense until one of us goes into the lake.
13. in the dark so many months later, you tell me that you want to spend time living 
on both coasts, but that you are like an elephant. when you feel you are going to die, 
you will return to the midwest, to where you were born. you want to be ashes & you 
want to be in the lake you have always known.


Maybe Flowers Would Grow Soon

Marquette, Gretchen

the iowa review 53
Under a Glass Mosaic of Blue Hearts 
Dear Lorca, I am forgetting everything you taught me. I am letting beau-
ty blanch in direct sunlight. The dried flowers are rotten stems fixed to 
permanent blue. Yesterday I saw a photo of the human nervous system 
stripped bare on a silver table. Yesterday I saw every stem and twig on 
every tree lit with snow. I’ve been reading about the separation between 
things—it may be illusory. I’ve been assured: the unity of life is empiri-
cal fact. Still, I can’t get away with touching the hair of the stranger 
in the café or his beautiful arms tattooed with clockwork. I can’t tie 
the shoes of the little boy who stares up at his mother’s face while she 
talks to the barista. He’s on the verge of tears and old enough that this 
embarrasses him. Soon, he won’t be able to cross the street with easy 
grace, smiling at nothing. His adult teeth have arrived, too large for his 
mouth. His mother reaches over and cups his shoulders. She buys him 
a large glass of milk. I love him on your behalf, you who always knew 
what to say to children in their grief. 


Under a Glass Mosaic of Blue Hearts

Cruz, Cynthia

88
cynthia cruz
Zero
Birth is the first death. 
Removed, like a blind wet seal, from that black gelatinous not-knowing. 
Not nothingness. 
The emptiness that is not. Emptiness, not soundless, but underwater 
like an endless whir. The deep blue-black of the pre-verbal, the ooze and 
glut of not. Of not-knowing, of the language of drunken stupor. 
I came into this world like everyone: animal, slick with shit and death 
and birth and brine and excess. Gelatinous. 
Out of the gum, the yawn, a toothlessness. 
Without words, before language. 
The mouth, always hungry, always moving, teeth grinding, the mouth, 
always telling something, always, always eating. Its tiny white teeth, an 
animal’s, grinding the meat, swallowing, and always taking more in. 
Before fear before knowing, no knowledge, a song that never stops. 
Like alcoholic stupor, an idiot’s reverie, the body before, the mind still 
asleep in the sweet bruise of deep slumber. 
Feeding, ever feeding, on more—the meat of knowledge, the meat of 
knowledge, grinding to get at the core of knowing, knowing, knowing. 
This is where painting comes in—making without a body. Painting—
bodyless and childlike, smearing the pink, chalk-like paint on the blank 
walls. Smearing and gumming, excretions of silver and gold glitter into 
the wet goo, into the bleed of brilliant white and black ointment. 
Language-less, the body. Using the body as instrument, as means. 
Voiceless, soundless, without speech the mind finally quiets, returns to 
its mollusk-like slumber. Its animal. 


Zero

Levinson-LaBrosse, Alana Marie

Excerpts from " Five Sisters", by Nawaf

Gibson, Dobby

168
dobby gibson
April Light
The movers have arrived, terrified of books.
Maybe spooked by the bird feeder on its side,
spilled champagne coupe of a sodden god,
abandoned at the curb with a mattress,
as if someone has outgrown sleep. The last snow 
retreats into the earth to wait us out, or does it?
We can’t be sure. Swim lesson registration is full.
Raise the window just enough to let in
the present tense: where are the cowards now?
In the park, they pull the tarp off the carousel.
It turns out our dreams don’t change much.
A purple elephant chases a pink sea horse in circles,
four white stallions pull an empty chariot 
to the spot where even the youngest know to wait.


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Notes Toward a Thank You

[To lie down in still waters of erasure]

[With my spittle, with my cipher]

Maybe Flowers Would Grow Soon

Under a Glass Mosaic of Blue Hearts

Zero

Excerpts from " Five Sisters", by Nawaf

April Light

Outliving Kafka

Excerpts from "The City Of No Peace", by Mohammed

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