Communion of Dust
By Iris Jamahl Dunkle
It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
It's how I arrived in this place. Dust. Blood. Thin figures. Shadows stretched like bars against a farm gone fallow. Gone dust. Gone wind. My grandmother said, Steinbeck never got it right. The place. The leaving and how it felt: to be child in a world gone back to dust. She'd breath the dust into me some birthdays. Or, when I'd come back to visit from college. Until the dust stuck to my tongue, clouded my eyes as I tried to drift farther and farther away. She whispered into my ear the songs she'd sung in the canneries those long hours she'd worked as a child. Until the land had become me. No way to escape the need to carry it, to tell it right.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer and poet. Her books include the biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and her fourth poetry collection West : Fire : Archive (The Center for Literary Publishing, 2021). She is currently writing a biography about the author Sanora Babb which will be published by the University of California Press, 2024.
10/4 / Meet the Artist with visiting poet-in-residence Raina J. León / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 6:00 pm EST / Free
10/4 / Poetry Reading with visiting poet-in-residence Raina J. León and local poet Susannah Winters Simpson / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:30 pm EST / Free
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A beautiful poem by Iris Jamal Dunkle. The "dust" evokes death, obfuscation, dreaminess, longing.