IHLR NaPoMo Issue 2023

IHLR NAPOMO’23

Editor-in-Chief

LESLIE JILL PATTERSON

Poetry Editor

GEFFREY DAVIS

Senior Managing Editor

MAEVE KIRK

Managing Editors

JENNESSA HESTER

JOSH LUCKENBACH

ZACHARY OSTRAFF

NaPoMo 2023

Associate Editors:

TIMILEHIN ALAKE, BROCK ALLEN, EMMA AYLOR, WILLIAM BROWN, DAVID BRUNSON, MCKENAN BUNDY, COLLIN CALLAHAN, JAY CULMONE, WILL DENNIS, TYLER FLESER, JO

ANNA GAONA, MEGHAN GILES, GWYN HILL, VICTORIA HUDSON, AMELIE LANGLAND, LINDA MASI, LANDON MCGEE, BIBIANA OSSAI, REMY PINCUMBE, CATHERINE RAGSDALE, NICOLAS RIVERA, HANNAH RUSSELL, BRODY SHAPPELL, SIERRA SINOR, DUSTI K. SMITH, GRAYSON TREAT, AND BRIA WINFREE

Cover Photo: Alex Tihonovs

Copyright © 2023 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved.

Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. IHLR publishes three print issues and three electronic issues per year, at Texas Tech University, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department. For more information, visit www.ironhorsereview.com.

National Poetry Month 2023

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Foreword / LESLIE JILL PATTERSON

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The Moment I Discovered I Could Tell My Doctor to Write in “Refused” Next to My Weight / LILY GREENBERG

The Shirley Temple Kind / SHELLY HOLDER

FINALISTS

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Iron Horse Literary Review would like to thank its supporters, without whose generous help we could not publish Iron Horse successfully. In particular, we would like to thank our benefactors and equestrian donors. If you would like to join our network of friends, please contact us at ihlr.mail@gmail.com for information on the various levels of support.

Benefactors ($300)

Wendell Aycock

Lon and Carol Baugh

Beverly and George Cox

Sam Dragga

Madonne Miner

in memory of Charles Patterson

Gordon Weaver

Equestrian ($3,000 and above)

TTU English Department, Interim Chair William Wenthe

TTU College of Arts & Sciences, Dean Tosha Dupra

TTU Graduate School, Dean Mark Sheridan

TTU Provost’s Office, Provost Ronald L. Hendrick

TTU President’s Office, President Lawrence Schovanec

e love National Poetry Month because it always acknowledges two things: 1) that not many people in the United States read poetry but also 2) it doesn’t have to be that way.

This month, influencers on YouTube and Instagram are hosting NaPoMo series: sharing poems by beloved poets or giving tutorials on the craft skills behind writing and reading poetry. Cities are hosting events in local parks— open mic sessions or performances held outside in the beautiful spring weather, drawing in every park-goer, not just academics. This year, Poets.Org’s 2023 NaPoMo poster features artwork by Marc Brown and a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s “The Carrying”—We were all meant for something—and you can download it for free at https://poets.org/nationalpoetry-month/get-official-poster. Bloggers are also posting about their efforts to write a poem a day, and prompts are suddenly appearing everywhere. Some sites put up their prompts years ago, but writers are turning toward them again in April 2023: consider those sponsored by Poetry Super Highway, Fifty Two Poetry, Poets & Writers, and various literary journals—you can access all of them for free. And NaPoWriMo is in the middle of hosting the annual “Write 30 Poems in 30 Days” challenge, which gives aspiring poets one prompt every day: https://www.napowrimo.net/.

On April 27, everyone can participate in Poets.org’s annual “Poem in Your Pocket Day.” How do you get involved? Instructions on their website say you can select a poem and share it on social media (using #PocketPoem and #NaPoMo as hashtags); record a video of yourself reading a poem to

share on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook; schedule a video chat and share a poem live; add a poem to your email footer; email a poem to your friends, family, neighbors, or local leaders; or read a poem out loud from your porch, window, balcony, bus stop, or train platform! There are so many ways to share poems with people who think they don’t like poetry—or that they don’t understand it—when really they just haven’t interacted with poems enough.

What I love most about NaPoMo is putting our annual issue together, which is Iron Horse’s way of honoring the genre and the celebration of it. Every year, the poets in this issue teach me so much about the magic of writing poetry that I almost think I could be a poet. I’m not one … but maybe. Or at least, these poems make me want to try new things—and sometimes I’ll translate their moves into action in one of my essays or short stories. How might a prose writer do something similar?

Consider how Lily Greenberg stacks images, leaning into fabulism, in the final stanza of her winning poem, “The Moment I Discovered I Could Tell My Doctor to Write in ‘Refused’ Next to My Weight.” Or the way some of this year’s poets entangle two threads into one poem: Coleman Taylor pairing up a dead bull with a dead relationship in “Dead Bull Waltz” and Melissa Holm Shoemake shocking us with the wedding of a Glock and The Glockenspiel in “Recoil.” Or M. Soledad Caballero’s “Ghosts Don’t Live by Our Rules,” which moves from shadows and doubt to morning light and possibility: single ghosts, the Holy Ghost, a pack of ghosts, could-be ghosts. Looking at the lines in Caballero’s poem, or at those in Frederick Speers’s “The Nihilist in the Neighborhood,” why would I ever again configure (or tolerate) well-behaved poetic lines? Look at what the line alone can do!

Always, we’re completely smitten with our NaPoMo submissions. We argue that This one! is our favorite and then take it back—No, this one!

Or, Maybe, this one! We can never decide … and so we’re grateful that our Poetry Editor, Geffrey Davis, is the one with the hard task of choosing the finalists and the winner. What an honor to have him working with us! Every year, he finds all the gems.

I’ll close out this foreword by recommending an April 1, 2023 article from BuzzFeed: “13 New and Upcoming Poetry Collections to Pick Up If You’re Trying to Get into Poetry.” In it, Laura Sackton recommends Gabrielle Bates’s Judas Goat, KB Brookins’s Freedom House, Mahogany L. Browne’s Chrome Valley, Ina Cariño’s Feast, K. Iver’s Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, Jae Nichelle’s God Themselves, José Olivarez’s Promises of Gold, Charif Shanahan’s Trace Evidence, Mahtem Shiferraw’s Nomenclatures of Invisibility, Clint Smith’s Above Ground, Jessica Q. Stark’s Buffalo Girl, Monica Youn’s From From, and Texas Tech alumna Mag Gabbert’s Sex Depression Animals. Congratulations to all these poets on their just-released or forthcoming books! Buy a copy! Take one to the beach or pool this summer; learn what our country’s youngest poets are up to and how much you might actually love poetry if you read a little bit of it. Poems today aren’t your high school teacher’s poetry. These poems are astounding and fresh and pushing against all the rules.

LESLIE JILL PATTERSON EDITOR

The Moment I Discovered I Could Tell My Doctor to Write in “Refused” Next to My Weight

LILY GREENBERG

was a kind of undoing—a washing away of the days of no jacket no shoes don’t even jeans no lunch make sure to breathe out think light my mother watching even when she wasn’t watching—

all of it gone! Now I’m none of your business wearing turtleneck sweater jacket (cozy) letting my uncupped tits go bug-eyed sight divided like a bird. Mystery me! Now white pants for the blood days, the hot red applause, the unwashed layering, how they brown, the seasons I create with my body—now I’m gardening my leg hair. Now I’m patenting a sour smell.

I’m ready for you to ask how much I am. Go on. Ask.

My weight is six hundred Halloween Oreos left out in the rain then dehydrated. My weight is a tire cut open and filled with soil then upright myrtle spurge plus the pressure of your hand in the blue gray leaves. I weigh exactly the ear of a baby elephant with thirty-one piercings minus sixteen flies. My weight is my mother when she was carrying me. I weigh the fifteen trash bags of clothes that don’t fit. If you stack all the hospital scales at 3 AM in February and put a blanket on them, that is how much I weigh. How much I weigh is my mother helping her mother into the car to get ice cream after the doctor. I weigh about seventy ice cream cones plus the tongue of my mother, and her mother’s too.

Winner Lily Greenberg

SHELLY HOLDER

The Shirley Temple Kind

after “Homewrecker” by Ocean Vuong

For this is our tap dance: with our mothers’ wishes slick under Mary Janes, summer beams

turning our curls into prisms. And this is how we loved back: rebellions heel-toe-step’d into the attic or basement,

fingers sweeping dust and draping cobwebs to cover shapes we chose to call boxes. We lipsticked

over sins and tantrums, our mouths red-painted coffins. Ribs a museum roof for the heart, white dresses hung

on headless dolls politely never minding their burning. There was always another match waiting to be lit.

Always another attic to sneak to with unsanctioned gods. If not an attic, the backseat of the car. If not the car, behind eyelids. Never the boy, always the boy. If not alive, still a girl, go put on some pretty clothes. Because

we’re performing in circles. Which is to say, this is how we dance: around and around, showcase of sleep-waltzing bodies.

Which is to say: this is how we’re coached to love: a knife on the tongue, that slices our cheeks into smiles.

Dead Bull Watlz

I. One time they discovered a dead bull

Down at the levee where I used to Set off fire works and shoot at copper Heads and rats hiding in the tall weeds.

Finalist Coleman Taylor

IHLR NaPoMo 2023

II. Folk argued ’bout the best way to get The bull out before flood came and washed The sucker into the creek. The brand Was Cooper’s so he drove his loader In and scooped the fucker out of there.

III. Burning a Spirit I stood and watched

Him drag the corpse out and drive real slow.

IV.

“Do you miss me, honey?”

I say to The static in my ear.

How long has

It been since I longed, how long since you Craved the burn of my skin

sweating on Yours, hot, damp?

I swat a mosquito

Finalist Coleman Taylor

Stealing your blood from my lonely neck.

V. The bull made local news when Cooper Found two rounds lodged deep in its skull, seeds In barren marrow soil. Reckoned it Took both rounds. First wouldn’t put it down.

Finalist Coleman Taylor

VI. The bull had been out too long in the Swelter to be any good now. The flies

Outlined low circles ’round it while I Stood and stared, letting the crimson mud Soak into my boots, the soles made soft By the filth.

VII.

The steel was freezing in my left hand. Like holding my fingers in snow ’til They burned red and tender and too raw.

VIII. I think I miss you still, miss, I think the way your hand stuck, as if frozen, To mine when we danced that one number,

Finalist Coleman Taylor

We learned way back when the sun still rose Early in the pastures and grazing fields

For you and I. I think I would like If we danced just once more. I see red, I see time stuck still I think I need You but fear you fear me as I do.

IX. I did not see fear in the bull’s eyes.

Finalist Coleman Taylor

MELISSA HOLM SHOEMAKE

Recoil

Three months before I get married, my father buys a Glock, and my mother tells me after thirty years she’s still not sure how to be a Christian wife.

I was thirteen when I saw the Glockenspiel in Munich. Every day, the bride and groom figurines stand witness to a carousel of celebration.

There must be more than submit? Since they are one flesh, what he wants is what she wants.

A standard-bearer circles in an endless march; the dancers spin like dolls in a ritualistic jig before the mechanical brutality of a jousting match. His new toy is sleek and grave.

The Bavarian knight always wins, snapping his opponent to his back. Glocken means bells. Spiel means play.

He plays with it unloaded at Christmas time while we watch old home movies on the couch. Each time he pulls the trigger is an awful tick.

The second hand of the clock moves backward slightly before lurching forward into a coil of hours.

Finally, he slips the gun back into its silhouette before locking the case, and in my mind, I push aside the matter of time.

The belfry’s song is ancient and out of tune. If there must be violence in nuptials, at my wedding, we will cleave.

Finalist Melissa Holm Shoemake

MELISSA HOLM SHOEMAKE

Self-Portrait in Haint Blue

I’m too young to understand separation, but my mother and I live without my father

in an apartment full of crickets, and there’s a dark cabinet in my bedroom growing mold

I play games in, searching for a talisman, creating my own alchemy. I cast myself as an ocean, wish my being into a sky.

Some nights, my father comes to me an apparition, slips through paper thick cracks in our foundation. I feign sleep, feel a rough palm stroke the curve of my golden 24

Finalist Melissa Holm Shoemake

skull. He created my breath to take it.

Our hours are restless, and in the chorus of the sawed chirps from the crickets, her prayer for protection to the Holy Spirit becomes a refrain:

Cover us in the blood of Jesus from the tops of our heads to the soles of our feet.

Even then, I know something of the future. My mother cannot suffer the pulse my father summons between her legs. He will needle love into a bomb, eventually strike her skin blue.

If faith is what makes the supernatural true, then I’m painting myself indigo watered down with my mother’s milk: My boo-hag is living.

Finalist Melissa Holm Shoemake

Ghosts Don’t Live by Our Rules

M.

SOLEDAD CABALLERO

from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story “Black-Eyed Woman”

They aren’t waiting for our love.

I have seen only the shadows of ghosts though my mother swears she swears she has seen her father’s for years.

After church, when she goes into the kitchen for morning coffee, when she gets into her car to take my nephew to golf practice, she says, si, ahí esta esperandome.

Ghosts are the other side of things, son del otro lado, the world made of shimmer promises, and if we are as lucky as Mary Magdalene after Jesus ascended from his cave, we will see ghosts, maybe even Jesus. Te lo prometo. Jesús es parte del Espiritu Santo, she explains matter-of-factly as if it’s obvious to everyone that ghosts and Jesus are in cahoots.

I do not know much about ghosts, about how they haunt or live or eat or walk around. The closest I ever got to any holy ghost was one night at church after the candles had blown out and it was time to shut off the lights in the sacristy. I saw blue light walk across the center aisle and kneel up at the altar. Maybe. 28

IHLR NaPoMo 2023

But I would never tell my mother about the shadow. She believes I’m an atheist. I want her to keep thinking I don’t believe in the body or the blood. Ghosts on the other hand. Maybe.

Not Jesús who my mother’s convinced is the first ghost, the ghost that guides all the other lonely sad ghosts up the stairs or the sky to a heaven where ghosts have a place to lie down and sleep with dogs and maybe some stars.

This is what she says about the Holy Ghost, that he is Jesús and not Jesús. God and not God. That ghost has a lot of rules about blood, what we should learn from proverbs.

31 Finalist M. Soledad Caballero

Like the one where ten bridesmaids waited for a bridegroom who was late, but it wasn’t the groom who got in trouble.

Or the one about the landlord who paid the men who worked all day and an hour the same amount.

Or the one about the son who worked his father’s lands, did all the tilling, never complained. Then his brother came home years later broke because he squandered his inheritance, and the father rejoiced and killed a calf and gave him new clothes and shoes. The older brother got nothing.

It’s supposed to be a story about how that dingdong was brought back from the dead and we should all be happy. Or something.

Ghost Jesus’s main deal seems all don’t-do’s, don’t-feels, and don’t-get-to’s.

I’m not into ghosts who make you feel bad about trying to hustle some joy.

Finalist M. Soledad Caballero

Still, there could be something else some other shadows.

Like in the mornings when the light through the curtains and the sounds of life are muffled like everything is swimming in water, that half wide-eyed time when things are still being made in our hearts there

could be ghosts then.

Ghosts who are not God. Ghosts who are like wildness. Ghosts who are like love.

Because I cannot give you a child-caring robot

JULIA KOLCHINSKY DASBACH

who will boil the marrow out of beef bones to feed our sick children our great-grandmothers’

borsch because they were both named Vera & wore their faith under their tongues because they sang a dead language alive

because I do not know if our bloods boiled beets in the same dead sea

because the boiling point below sea-level in your Odesa is lower

than my Dnepr riverland but now we are both in sick elevation

red & drinking too much tea & never enough vodka because never enough is this country

we came to for too much of everything & I remember my Vera would wear

black circles down her spine as proud evil eyes left from cupping this is how we know

sickness has left the body she’d say it leaves its dark mark but you & I

37 Finalist Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

refuse such treatment & cough & carry our sick under our clothes & hold our children & take care of our sick spouses & drink our tea & make wishes on loose leaves at the bottoms of spent cups because help doesn’t come & in the morning

I'll text you a picture of wilted flowers & the caption parents feel dead inside & we will laugh about self-portraits & January

being years long & robots taking care of us & I’ll send you this poem & call it

sickness leaving its dark mark

Anti-Pastoral b/w Interlocking Tercets

(7" Series #6)

JOHN A. NIEVES

The apple orchards gnarled into hills, whispering the scent of mulling spice and dust down toward the cranberry bogs, the tapped maples. On early

fall nights, we’d drag the old gray extension cord onto the porch and light up tiny plastic jacko-lanterns. It was quiet enough to hear the scores of leaves shaking loose onto the forest floor. Backed up to the screen was an old tall-back chair where we’d sit guests so it was never anyone’s spot, a blank

that could hold any name any day. And there is nothing like that now. I expect no one, no stranger cutting the crisp autumn with the whisp of a joke, aware

Finalist John A. Nieves

that they were only passing. Every seat here has a name, and staying is a quieter thing than leaving. A tree turns from shade into a complex letter against the same

dusking sky. And I have become a tree. And no tree visits another. And stranger is only an observation made from the outside. And outside is only outside if there is screen

or wall or fence. And inside is only inside if space is well defined. A cage is always inside. The apples, the maples, the swamps are thirty years away,

and no cord is long enough to light the way back. We are full of jobs, of schedules, of meals and sleep. The things that used to reach in have pulled back, gone dull.

The Nihilist in the Neighborhood

FREDERICK SPEERS

who out up & down the block early one morning yellow broom in hand gently shook the latespring & heavy snow from all the bent branches even the dead ones yes even the dead

Finalist Frederick Speers

Jesus in Roswell

I know what we had and what we stole: I was thinking of the dead

and how we’re always walking, inches over their brutality.

My people went from green to green: I was born to be another field

and I’m from the part of America you’re probably worried about.

But here now, above the saltbush and creosote, the sun draws itself like another blood feather.

They’re turning birds away now at the border, saying we won’t all fit

and I can’t believe some of you are rooting for this— like Christ’s skull is just some white stone to tumble clean.

FROM THE Horse’s Mouth

a conversation about voice, metaphor, random writing, and starting anew with Lily Greenberg

IHLR: We love how you make use of the long explanatory title in this poem: “The Moment I Discovered I Could Tell My Doctor to Write in ‘Refused’ Next to My Weight.” It sets the stage perfectly and leads right into the first line: “was a kind of undoing.” We’re interested in the way that the moment captured in the title, the moment when you took agency over the (medical) language used to describe a patient, leads to a “washing away” of past traumatic events. Can you elaborate on this?

GREENBERG: Thanks for that—I do love a long title! I think that language is pivotal in how we understand reality. For me, it was incredibly empowering to shift from measuring myself with a number (weight) to . . . however I wanted to measure myself! It did wonders for my self-esteem. The point is that it’s all so arbitrary. Weight stigma is, as it turns out, completely misinformed. BMI is a hoax. And yet, so many of us (women in particular) have allowed weight to be a real indicator of how we’re “doing.” And what if we didn’t? While I can’t change what happened (what’s done is done!), I can let it go and open myself up to what’s next. Another way to put it: I’m free—now what to do with that freedom? Here is where the poem begins.

IHLR: There’s a wonderful shift in stanza three that leads into the long list of the final stanza: “I’m ready for you to ask how much I am. / Go on. Ask.” The poem is speaking right off the

page, daring the reader to wonder about the speaker’s weight. What role does reading/speaking aloud play in your writing process?

GREENBERG: Well, I’m about to out myself as someone who speaks to herself (often) (sometimes in public). I remember early on in grad school when my mentor told me I was a “voice poet”—i.e., tone, vibrato, etc., were my most natural tools. This was true, and still is. The way a poem feels spoken aloud dictates pretty much everything for me. Apart from more craft-oriented questions I can ask of a poem that I’m writing (are the images developed? do the lines track?), it needs to feel good to say aloud. This is a highly intuitive, subjective question, but important! If I walk around saying the poem, do I mean it? How does it feel in my body? Do I cry (bonus points)? I can only know this through speaking.

IHLR: We’re captivated by the long list of metaphors in the final stanza, especially when the images become difficult to parse, like in the lines, “I weigh exactly the ear of a baby elephant / with thirty-one piercings minus sixteen flies.” I wonder if you can say something about how this list came together? Also, what is your relationship to the surreal? Does it play a significant role in your work?

GREENBERG: This list was a blast to make. Because I was exploring freedom from conventional ways of measuring myself, I wanted to make a list that was as absurd as I could muster. I moved quickly, aiming for specificity and silliness (Halloween Oreos, baby elephants, etc.). Though these images were fairly random, I can see my subconscious at work: Oreos were a “forbidden” food for me back when I was dieting, and a former me would have been horrified to weigh anything near an elephant, even a baby. What I’m getting at here is actually central to my relationship to the surreal—letting my subconscious do the work. Poets have done this kind of “random” writing for centuries, in games like Haikai No Renga (haiku masters) or Exquisite Corpse (New York School), both of which I highly recommend for anyone trying to relax into writing. What surprised me most in the list was ending up back where I started—in lineage, thinking of my mother and grandmother, who historically taught me the most about dieting and maintaining a certain

weight. To then define myself as the weight of their bodies together, the weight of their tongues eating endless ice cream cones—I can’t really tell you how I got there, but I can tell you the images resonate. That was a transformation—a reclaiming—I needed.

IHLR: Who is a writer you’ve learned something from craft-wise? What specific thing did you learn, and how have you applied that to your own poetry (and, perhaps, to this poem in particular)?

GREENBERG: Last year, I attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Ilya Kaminsky’s workshop. One exercise that Ilya had us do together was divide into groups and create lists of nouns and verbs that we liked. Then, we combined them into images. Then, pushed the images to the far reaches of complexity. I loved this exercise because it gave a doable process to replace the much more challenging task of creating a complex image on the spot. In my poem, I didn’t use this exact exercise, but I did start with fairly simple images then pushed them into more intriguing territories through elaboration. For example, my list started with a stack of hospital scales—then, to make it more complex, I added at 3 AM in February, and put a blanket on them! I wouldn’t use this exercise in every poem, but I would recommend it for any poem that is aiming for think-outside-the-box specificity.

IHLR: Your debut book of poems, In the Shape of a Woman, came out in 2022. What are you working on now? Is your new work a pivot from or a continuation of the poems in your first book?

GREENBERG: I just finished (for now) a second book manuscript titled Mrs. God, which contains mostly poems that investigate who/what God is through a queer/feminine/American lens. “The Moment I Discovered […]” is part of that collection. I’d say my new work is both a continuation of and a departure from my last book: “continuation” in the sense that I’m still writing voice-driven poems, and “departure” in that “I” am not the only speaker of the poems. Mrs. God is still fresh, though, and I am still discovering what’s going on here, what

IHLR NaPoMo 2023

makes these poems their own book. As someone without kids, I can naively say that making a book is like having a baby—at some point, my child tells me who they are, as distinctive from the others. I think I’m at the beginning of that now with this new book. The work is telling me who it is. I’m listening!

—Josh Luckenbach COLUMN EDITOR

In the Saddlewith

When we first started prepping this column, Megan Mary Moore told us that her writing space doubles as her dressing room: “To me, style and art are inseparable, so it makes sense that the place where I dress is the place where I create poetry.” This concept of a hybrid workspace—a place where self and craft, body and work, dance together— offers a small glimpse into what makes Moore’s poetry special.

As we read through her recent collection, To Daughter a Devil (Unsolicited Press, 2023), we noticed many traces of her hybrid workspace. The dolls became vessels of embodiment and ethereality, spirits trapped in plastic flesh who don’t want “to be anybody forever, / in any body forever.” The waterfall vanity found form in poems about reflection, transforming into a fractured magic mirror that “kisses you to tell you that / she tried talking to God, / but her mouth only moves with yours.” Snow White and Marie Antoinette, too, found a home in these pages.

Perhaps most striking, though, was how the lush, plush, and blush effeminacies of the space ran through the collection, paralleling what Moore describes as the key focus of her work: the “gorgeous and sometimes horrifying terrain of the feminine body.” Looking over these pictures, we can’t help but think of Moore’s hybrid workspace as a body itself, how women often build our feminine identities into the objects around us.

My glass top desk has been my tried-and-true writing spot since 2015, but in 2022, I decided to add flower stickers around the perimeter of the glass, and it restored my faith in my desk and in stickers.

My diary and tablet live on my desk when they aren’t out with me in my bag. I write in both without any rhyme or reason. Sometimes a pen feels better than keys; sometimes I can’t stand the look of my own handwriting. They are both covered in stickers. Never underestimate the power of a good sticker.

The figure of the Venus de Milo belonged to my grandfather and used to sit dusty on his basement workbench before he died. Though this is a far different environment for her, she continues to oversee creation, and the more topless women in my room the better.

In the Saddle

In September 2022, I started receiving anonymous antique dolls in the mail. Since then, I've acquired a collection. Although I still don’t know who the first dolls were from, friends and family now give me dolls that need a little extra love. I’m happy these little ladies have a home on my desk. I like to think their memories and energy find their way into my writing. They also serve as my personal secretaries, taking phone calls and making notes. This is why one is stationed by the phone.

I keep at least two books on my desk at all times, for those moments where I’m apt to stare blankly at my pink walls. I’ll flip through the books and look for a phrase or sentiment that inspires or leads me to some written response. Right now: I Love You

Madly: Marie-Antoinette and Count Fersen: The Secret Letters by Evelyn Farr, and Snow White and Other Grimms’ Fairy Tales, illustrated by MinaLima.

A print of Marie Antoinette, by the artist Deven, sits in the middle of my desk. I have a tender spot for Antoinette. Her life was tragic, fabulous, and infamous—and perfect fodder for poetry.

A rack of pink, white, and lavender dresses stands against the wall. I can’t imagine having a writing space without pretty dresses—even though more often than not, I’m wearing an oversized T-shirt and underwear while writing.

Whatever records currently preoccupy me are displayed here. I can’t write without music. I need a constant barrage of images, sounds, and colors parading through my head before I can attempt to create.

My antique waterfall vanity has been painted mint green and collects perfume, movie ticket stubs, discarded hair ties, and loose glitter—anything I could possibly need within arm’s reach while drafting and redrafting.

In the Saddle

—Jennessa Hester COLUMN EDITOR

Henrietta Goodman (22.1) won honorable mention in the 2022 Backwaters Prize in Poetry for her collection Antillia. Christine Stewart-Nuñez judged. Goodman received $1,000, and her book will be published in 2024 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Around the Tracks

Katie Hartsock (16.4 and 24.1) has a second book of poems, Wolf Trees, forthcoming from Able Muse Press in early 2023.

Carolyn Oliver (21.2) won the 2021 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble. Matthew Olzmann judged. Oliver received $1,000 and publication of her book by University of Utah Press.

Claudia Putnam (NaPoMo 2022) published a new collection, The Land of Stone and River, with Moon City Press in March 2022. It was the winner of the 2020 Moon City Poetry Award.

Adam Scheffler (21.2) published a second book, Heartworm, with Moon City Press in January 2023. It was the winner of the 2021 Moon City Poetry Award.

Adam Tavel (22.4) released a new collection of poetry, Rubble Square, with Stephen F. Austin State University Press in October 2022.

Chelsea Woodard (12.2) won the 2022 Michael Waters Poetry Prize for At the Lepidopterist’s House. She received $5,000, and her book will be published by Southern Indiana Review Press in 2023.

IHLR NaPoMo 2023

Contributors

M. Soledad Caballero, Professor of English and co-chair of the WGSS department at Allegheny College, is a Macondo and CantoMundo fellow, winner of Cutthroat’s 2019 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and SWWIM Every Day’s 2020 For-the-Fun-of-It contest. Her collection, I Was a Bell (2021), won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and was published by Red Hen Press. I Was a Bell was named 2022 Book of the Year by the International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry and was also a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner.

Caballero says she started writing the many drafts of “Ghosts Don’t Live by Our Rules” in April 2020: “I had signed up for a daily poetry prompt exercise and wrote a poem a day. This was a time when we were taking COVID seriously, and God was definitely on my mind. The poems I was writing seemed to be wrestling with God, with religion, which, as a practicing agnostic, I seem to do a lot! The phrase on my mind for this poem was ghosts don’t live by our rules, which is a line from an amazing short story by Viet Thanh Nguyen called ‘Black-Eyed Women.’ This story is about a mother and daughter and a son and brother who return to their lives as ghosts. The line is something the mother says about her son’s return, and it was the spark of the poem for me. I spent a lot of time crafting the voice and tone of the speaker, trying to capture an adult-child and parent dynamic as they work through the idea of God as a ghost. I wanted the speaker’s voice to be simultaneously in tune with church and stories in the Bible but also resistant to being part of that tradition and knowledge base. This poem also experiments with form, which is something I have been trying to do more in my work. Initially, the form was these blocks of text all lined up with the same margins; then I tried working on it as a script form; then I was once again inspired by the short story, which has a

lot of water imagery that surrounds the brother’s ghost. That idea of water dripping off a body is what ultimately led me to think about this form for the poem. I think of it as deeply irreverent and deeply captured by the idea of faith and God.”

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother; Don't Touch the Bones; and 40 WEEKS. Her poems have recently appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Dasbach is the author of the model poem for “Dear Ukraine”: A Global Community Poem (https://dearukrainepoem. com/). She is Assistant Professor and Murphy Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with her family.

Dasbach says “Because I cannot give you a child-caring robot” emerged from the January 2021 wave of COVID: “After nearly two years of precaution and avoidance, many of us emerged from holiday gatherings and travel to find ourselves sick despite the protection of vaccinations and boosters. I was sick for weeks while having to also take care of my kids who were asymptomatic. This poem was written for Luisa Muradyan, with whom I had spent quarantine exchanging letters in the form of poems about the overwhelming experience of simultaneously navigating the landscape of a pandemic and parenting young children. I remembered how much writing to her helped me through the thick of a much longer quarantine, without childcare or outside help, so during this moment of difficulty, I turned to write to her again. She and her family were sick at the same time, and I wanted to help us both in some way. In the absence of a magical robot, I wrote her this poem about our shared Jewish-refugees-from-Ukraine ancestry—and how resilient it has made us, how able to endure hardship we are in part because we come from a history of surviving trauma.”

Erin Elkins Radcliffe is the author of two collections of poetry: Bottomland (Sundress Publications) and Station of Rain (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Smartish Pace, and other journals.

Originally from southern Indiana, Elkins Radcliffe now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Links to her work can be found at erinelkinsradcliffe.com.

Radcliffe says that “Jesus in Roswell” came from a misreading: “I wrote the poem halfway through a writing challenge I took part in during last year’s National Poetry Month. I’m sometimes not the most careful reader of online texts, and I thought I caught the phrase Jesus in Roswell in a news article. Many people wait for Christ’s return; this poem takes place in his absence and in that waiting.”

Lily Greenberg is a poet from Nashville, Tennessee, and the author of In the Shape of a Woman (Broadstone Books, 2022). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in On the Seawall, Cutleaf Journal, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, About Place Journal, and LEON Literary Review, among others, and she is the 2021 recipient of the Dick Shea Memorial Prize for Poetry. Her work has been funded by Bread Loaf Writers, University of New Hampshire, and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. Greenberg holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and lives in New York, where she serves as Grants Coordinator for Columbia University. Learn more at lily-greenberg.com.

Greenberg says “The Moment I Discovered I Could Tell My Doctor to Write in ‘Refused’ Next to My Weight” practically fell onto the page—though not without years of buildup: “Having grown up in a dieting family and experiencing years of disordered eating, there was a tremendous freedom when I stopped weighing myself, which was about five years ago. Now, it’s been so long that if a doctor asks me to step on the scale, I feel like laughing! The poem started with the line Now I’m none of your business, which just feels good to say. But then I needed an after, I needed something to transform, so I started riffing on the most ridiculous and complicated images I could think of to measure my weight. This was partially inspired by a Bread Loaf workshop I was in with Ilya Kaminsky, who constantly had us make our images more complicated. What surprised me most about this poem was the way the mother kept interacting with the transformed weight images, this time with a completely different tone (watchful mother becomes mother and grandmother eating ice cream). I loved that reclaiming of lineage. It was powerful to see an image of judgment turn into delight.”

To learn more about Greenberg’s winning poem and her writing process, see this issue’s FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH, pp. 46-49.

Shelly Holder’s poetry has been published by Gyroscope Review, in both print and audio format, and also featured in a video recording shared on the Palm Beach Poetry Festival’s YouTube page. Other poetry can be found at One Art, Verse-Virtual, and Mandala Review, whereas her flash fiction can be found at Camden Press and DOGZPLOT. She teaches virtual generative workshops through The Poetry Salon and runs several poetry book clubs. Holder lives somewhere she likes to call an “outer-outer-outer” suburb of Los Angeles, where she struggles to get an orange tree to bear fruit.

On the genesis of “The Shirley Temple Kind,” Holder writes, “I have always had a tendency to mimic, but in poetry, I learned that mimicry is interaction, continuing a conversation, adding another layer or perspective, widening the scope. With Vuong’s poem, I was thinking about how love can be circular, oddly ritualized, performative. I wanted to extend the original premise to consider how love is shown to girls—especially that cliched category of ‘good girls’—by mothers, families, society, how it can become a trap or cage, and how those girls learn to express love, both sincere and subverted. This dance of expectation and rebellion is passed along in the silences and smiles that somehow never get questioned.”

Melissa Holm Shoemake lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and two sons, where she works in college administration at Emory University. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Mississippi, and her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including The Southern Humanities Review, The American Poetry Journal, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. Her chapbook, Ab.sin.the., is available from dancing girl press.

Holm Shoemake says that “Recoil” and “Self-Portrait in Haint Blue” are re-writes of poems she wrote years ago: “Through a series of difficult life events, I was forced to take a hiatus from writing for several years, so I had fresh eyes in revisiting the earlier versions of these poems. ‘Recoil’ was initially a hastily written response to an episode of This American Life that brought up memories of my

childhood. The dribble I wrote was never a fully formed poem, but it played on the elements of moving back and forth through time, highlighting the fact that the past is always affecting the present somehow, especially when it comes to trauma. As the poem indicates, I spent my last Christmas as an unmarried woman in my parents’ home, creating the situation of two overlapping seasons of reflection. I was also interested in the word play of Glock and glockenspiel, but I abandoned the poem for several years until I was able to parse out and pare down the language. After another round of revision, the poem found its present form.

“‘Self-Portrait in Haint Blue’ is also a rewrite that retains the situation of the earlier version along with a few lines here and there, but I added the conceit of the color haint blue and its history, which completely reframed the poem. Much of my current body of work has themes of things-that-haunt, so I was researching various iterations of ghosts or spirits across the globe. I also live in the American South, where the coastal tradition of Gullah Geechee culture has permeated the region and been watered down to the point that painting the ceiling of your porch a pale sky blue is just what you do—the history behind it, the reason why, is almost lost. At the time, I was enrolled in a workshop, and I had the assignment to write a self-portrait poem. I may have been a little too literal in my thinking, but I imagined an actual painting of myself in blue.

Megan Mary Moore is a poet working in Cincinnati, Ohio, and living in a fairy princess fever dream. She is the author of two full-length collections, Dwellers (Unsolicited Press, 2019) and To Daughter a Devil (Unsolicited Press, 2023), and also the forthcoming chapbook And Aphrodite Laughed (Milk & Cake, 2023). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Miami University and writes about the gorgeous and sometimes horrifying terrain of the feminine body. To learn more about Moore’s writing process, see this issue’s IN THE SADDLE, pp. 50-53.

John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as North American Review, Copper Nickel, American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, and Southern Review. He won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest, and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He

is Associate Professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry. He received his MA from University of South Florida and his PhD from the University of Missouri.

For Nieves, the poem “Anti-Pastoral b/w Interlocking Tercets (7" Series #6)” began as “part of a series mixing a form and a mode of the lyric, with one being broken. The idea was that the two would combine like the A and B sides of a 7" single to create a whole. This particular poem started as an attempt to play with the way freedom earned also becomes freedom lost—how when we grow and earn our own way, certainty becomes a responsibility instead of a luxury. The form of the poem was an attempt to constrict, while the anti-pastoral hoped to free the poem from the traditional pastoral work. The hope was that the poem’s form, content, and mode would work together to leave a lasting impression.”

Frederick Speers (he/him) is the author of So Far Afield (Nomadic Press), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His chapbook, In the Year of Our Making and Unmaking was selected by Carl Phillips for the Frontier Poetry Chapbook Award in 2020. Speers’s poems have appeared in AGNI (Online); Crab Creek Review, winner of the 2020 poetry contest, selected by Keetje Kuiper; Diode Poetry Journal; Forklift, Ohio; Impossible Archetype; Tahoma Literary Review; Portland Review; The Rumpus; Salamander Magazine; and Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly. He lives in Colorado with his husband and their three dogs. Learn more about his work at www.frederickspeers.com.

Speers says his poem, “The Nihilist in the Neighborhood,” is written in “a new form that I’m experimenting with, which I’m calling a fibration, after the mathematical term used in mapping topological spaces. I’m interested in mapping the space of the poem as it moves into and through existence while breaking lines in new ways. The contents of this poem likely originated from my reading too many books on religion and nothingness. And I believe it was, in fact, snowing that day.”

Coleman Taylor is working toward his MFA in Film and Television Studies at Boston University. He grew up in Texas and is a graduate of Texas Tech University.

Taylor says he’s not sure exactly where the images in “Dead Bull Waltz” came from: “It was one of those near-fugue states of writing where the shape of the thing comes unconsciously and all I’m doing is getting out of my pen’s way. Still, there are some explanations for the general subject. Some of my favorite poetry is that which palpably evokes a sense of place. Sometimes I try to deliberately capture this feeling in my own writing; other times, I finish a poem and think, Damn, I wrote another one about West Texas. I wrote this poem a little over a year after leaving Lubbock, and increasingly, I feel the region’s presence in anything good I’ve written since then, and I do not think this one is an exception. I’ll admit, though, that I’m burying another lead slightly. I had a fairly (very) significant relationship end at the beginning of 2022, to which some passages of the poem might allude. Similar to the sense of place, I don’t think this was something I was intending to write, just something I realized in the revisions. Funny how the important things seem to work their way into poetry, regardless of intent.”