IHLR NAPOMO ’25
NaPoMo 2025
Editor-in-Chief
LESLIE JILL PATTERSON
Poetry Editor
GEFFREY DAVIS
Senior Managing Editor
JENNESSA HESTER
Managing Editors
NAVEED ALAM
BROCK ALLEN
MARCOS DAMIÁN LEÓN
BIBIANA OSSAI
Associate Editors:
Saima Afreen, O-Jeremiah Agbaakin, Alejandro Aguirre, Erin Arnold, Valeria Bourret, Collin Callahan, Will Dennis, Maia Elgin, Adefemi Fagite, Kristyn Garza, Loria Harris, Prosper Ìféányí, Molleigh Judd, Amelie Langland, Michael Levan, Blue Nguyen, Olatunde Osinaike, Natalie Perman, Abhijeet Singh, and Othuke Umukoro,
Cover Photo: Freya-Photographer, Shutterstock.com
Copyright © 2025 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 2025
1
Foreword / LESLIE JILL PATTERSON
WINNER FINALISTS
4 Museums / KATIE HARTSOCK
There Is the Sea, And Who Can Drain It Dry? / KATIE HARTSOCK
10
From the Horse’s Mouth
In the Saddle
he year 2025 is the year we expected—except we didn’t grasp how fast American nationalism would wrecking ball our country and its reputation abroad. Then, as one managing editor said, we definitely didn’t have campus explosions and green flames on our bingo cards, but when Texas Tech lit up one March Wednesday night, it tracked. Then came winds that lifted trampolines into the sky and flipped eighteenwheelers on our highways. Simmering behind everything: measles. An outbreak in the year 2025. It’s difficult to write a foreword. Prose doesn’t seem up to the task of the moment; so we’re listening to the voices of past IHLR poets. Lines and phrases from every issue. A chorus. We hope you find hope and inspiration here. Thanks to the poets in these pages—and poets across the country. May your words remain protected.
IN POETRY
(a found poem)
1.
How long has it been since / we felt like real people? / Each day comes at us like a car we must stare down. / A knife that slices our cheeks into smiles.
2.
We stood under the stars that last Thanksgiving. / November and unseasonable: warmer: but still the hint: the hint, the hint of what was to come. / We couldn’t stop crying. We couldn’t stop cussing. / We didn’t stop it, okay. / By
Foreword
January, the snow made its bank against our torsos. / The men began stringing hooks and we know how that goes. / We sighed and moaned about the dangers. / We comforted each other so dangerously.
3.
There’s a monster named Remember. / It’s just like last time. It’s happening all over again. / He lifts one America with his pincers & offers it to us, / sometimes with a smile, sometimes singing a song to which he doesn’t know the words. / He stands for nothing but his own hunger. / We didn’t want him living in our house. / He is the burning building from which we need to be saved, / and we ask him to put the knife down and he laughs and we ask him to put the knife down.
4.
Last week, a pack of wolves downwind raised muzzles to the air and howled. / Dogs learn quick, each one raised bravo in Texas. / The wolves are ours, and they are hungry. / If only someone would write music that could stop the deportation buses. / But the neighbors stare from respectable windows. / Whole families close their windows and cover their faces. / What do they know about being hunted? / This is America, after all.
5.
This America makes me afraid to have children. / Our children use the American flagpole as a bayonet. / Our children ogle warplanes. Our children lack context. / Our children carry everything their parents have left unattended. / Our children will tear off the front of the parents. / Each day at school, a first grader calls another boy weak. / A teenager says to his girlfriend, Show me your jugular, / teach me how to kill.
IHLR NaPoMo 2025
We are not dead yet. / The heart still beats 15,000 times a day. / This may be terrible, or a relief.
7.
We were warned. / We were warned / when there were no more birds to hold it together, what would happen to the sky. / The water wants to hold us up to let us walk across, / but what little water we have our parents use to green the lawn and frack the ground, / a willful ignorance that chokes the whole garden. / The farmers lift pistols to their temples. / A bullet of wind blows out the brains of another tree.
8.
We got nothing left / not even the idea of California, no, / but we can call out their bullshit when we see it—in poems. / That is to say, / when we pass by, they will smell the tar and feathers on our breath. / Where we choose to live is just the beginning.
LESLIE JILL PATTERSON EDITOR
NOTE: For a list of poets whose lines appear in “In Poetry,” see the contributors note on page 63.
Museums
KATIE HARTSOCK
and the torturer's horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
—Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”
On the way home from an OB appointment the week I turned forty-one, I sat in a funk at a red light when the van two lanes away exploded— but no, then I pulled over, saw the motorcycle smashed, the van caved in, the rider thrown almost fifty feet from bike. Had my gaze been facing up, I’d have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky. I stood by his shoe, fallen off and rolled into a parking lot. Someone else was at his side, back blocking his helmeted face, hands clutching his to his chest.
He was shaking. I saw his foot, white sock a little smudged. The auto shop guys gathered, said they heard him coming way too fast up the hill. The neighbors who’d been just walking dully along called it his fault as an ambulance carried off his shaking,
Winner Katie Hartsock
IHLR NaPoMo 2025
though I took some home with me too. I read the news that night, and checked days later, on our way to what would be my first and last air show.
And found his obituary—just twenty years old, and the calling hours already held. As if I’d wanted to tell his mother that I heard the voice there telling him everything would be all right. He was on my mind by the vintage biplanes, the food trucks and a bounce house,
inside an Air Force transporter where we shook a pilot’s hand. We watched the show from our car; the boys sat on top, legs dangling through the moonroof. When the MiG-23 took off for its first pass from crowd to landfill, our six-year-old asked, “Russian? Why do we have that plane?” I was pausing when he said, “Well, either we captured it, or someone defected”—Jack Ryan and The Hunt for Red October
Winner Katie Hartsock
IHLR NaPoMo 2025
on his mind. Then, screams across the airfield as black balls of smoke unrolled, and rumors the pilots ejected before the MiG crashed so close
to a major highway, stopped just at the carport of a minor apartment complex— all very cinematic, no?
Miraculous, the lack of death, and we drove slowly home (slowly, as the announcers urged, who had all day praised speed), past air show parties now
returned to their backyard grills and picnics while the MiG burned up to the east. To live is to have somewhere to get to.
For weeks I played Paul Simon’s
“Mother and Child Reunion” for the peace it gave, strange as its grief and that title he took from a menu: a dish made with both chicken and egg.
Winner Katie Hartsock
There
KATIE HARTSOCK
asks Clytemnestra, her voice rich with murder in a house that does not know how to be poor.
Her king’s arriving home from war—a long one, the big one—but this is about his queen and a rug:
she will give him a bath and the best of her axe, but first she persuades him to walk on the rug.
I don’t know, do you want to like call me or something, if you want more of the story? After eight
it’s quiet, but once we get the kids to sleep I’m done, usually, except Clytemnestra can wake me up
like a glass of red will wake the night. And the rug, the rug is purple, which is why
Finalist Katie Hartsock
the king doesn’t want to cross it, and why her line about the sea is a real monster, showing how far back it goes: the brass antiquity of human insistence that what Earth gives is inexhaustible. Purple, royal, because the dye was costly, exclusively sourced from Mediterranean mollusk secretions, a substance rare and dear as silver, since the harvesting was hard, scarce. So when she says, Go on, darling, trample it, trash it, we can always get more, maybe that’s the poet saying: This is how some people think, even now, thousands of years ago. Tell me something good, when we talk, about the sea, another potential ghost in the trilogy, who gets this dirge of a question I want to ask again, after asking almost nothing of it, in classes where at best theatrical classicists would explain mollusks.
Finalist Katie Hartsock
IHLR NaPoMo 2025
Fossil Record Reveals Early Cambrian Origins
LINDSAY D’ANDREA
You are getting used to a new place, committed to the work it takes to adjust or accept. One nuance is called hard water, with its steam of cedar bogs,
boiled mud, single-celled truths rushing from every faucet to beckon the ancient,
Finalist Lindsay D’Andrea
the mineral. Observe the showerhead gathering flecks of white brine as if lifted
from the deep-down dark of the ocean. This is how to carry on—you forget
the smell after those first years, after sulfur starts to disguise itself
as dead skin, sun-blitzed hair, wilted rosemary and pipe steel. Meanwhile
rusty reminders drip into a stain at the bottom of the bathroom sink.
You rub your thumb against it to judge permanence, measuring
time elapsed, time required to form a shell indicating the detritus
of a once-life. Inhale, burrow through silt like a trilobite.
Earth is the first home, the only one to which you can ever return.
Lindsay D’Andrea
LINDSAY D’ANDREA
Ferragosto
In March, artichokes reach the height of their short season outside of Rome. Plucked quick from their stems, fried whole in oil, strained and struck together like stones—there is no more tender dish, I’m told. No choke in Romanesco. Rich purple fist of meat, bract, and bulb tight as a wet rose. Its preparation guarded with lemon against browning. Enjoyed at a specific time, that precise place, purposeful as a series of well-timed breaths.
Finalist Lindsay D’Andrea
The chart says you will be born in March—nervous month, grasping itself only in brief moments. Your presence is still new to me as our summer ends, hardly a heartbeat. First raindrops upon the roof before humid burst,
sigh. I have an aspiration to forget my own encasing. More than ten years ago I promised myself one taste, a single March in the Jewish quarter, the air sparkling with silver shade as spring shifts over the Tiber.
Now I lie upstairs listening to a summer storm nudge our home on its foundation, wind enough to lift the lip of an umbrella and send it whirling beneath the window like a wayward sail. Hailstones now, winter seeds drawn down only to melt. Half a world away
Romans shutter windows, collect families into small cars and shuffle south for August, seeking heat-healed hours winged by water, where yellow figs grow between whitened stones and each cricket at dusk finds just the right crack to whir that song I no longer hear—i am here, here, here.
Finalist Lindsay D’Andrea
JULIA KOLCHINSKY
Skin Hunger
Those first few newborn weeks, I wanted nothing but the milk-soft of my children, my flesh famished from theirs being inside where our skins couldn’t touch. The body is made to fit another’s. Years apart, each child
sunk into my chest as though returning home. And when they grew to sleep in their own beds instead of bare against my breasts, their father rested heavy there, his skin more wound than balm, but I admit, I liked the ache or reveled in the strength it took to bear it. The body is made to fit another’s. Organs shift and muscles
IHLR NaPoMo 2025
Finalist Julia Kolchinsky
IHLR NaPoMo 2025
accommodate, even the bone bows, my ring finger still ghosts the dented bind of wedding band.
For months after we stopped touching, I starved for larger hands, the weight of a body I didn’t make. My children hung and pulled and hugged and held; they tugged and kissed me and refused their beds now that mine was empty.
They hungered for my body as though their wet raspberries blown loud and slobber-young into my arms and belly, even calves, could take the place of their father’s mouth. It’s been nine months, a full human gestation, and for once, I wanted nothing but my skin alone with its own skin, a body made to fit another’s learning how to fit back into herself.
Finalist Julia Kolchinsky
On my first mention of Divorce
SHANNAN MANN
my husband drives the Outlander into the river or tries to but swerves to the right at the white lip of the bank where the gravel clusters with alluvium. This is the second time I have been in a car with a man one hand on the wheel another on my body and the man’s two hands are moving in different directions back and forth back and forth turning and tuning and forking and fjording. Though my father’s hand in my hair felt more violent, my husband’s grip on the dark blue wool sweater clumped around my shivering body is more threatening. Maybe it’s the river though rivers are not known to sink Titanic s and strand passengers on islands and force them to become cannibals who eat their friends. No, such terror belongs to the ocean. So, it’s not the river. It’s him with the blood in his brain the blood in his fists the blood in the air blood everywhere. Also, Dad let go after a minute. Also,
Finalist Shannan Mann
you cannot really rank two men trying to beat you up in a moving car. Also, I am just focusing on the river now how green it rises then white silver nearly black if I don’t blink river rivers rule the world really they can help you forget so much like that your car might drown inside them or that your husband is holding you hostage because you said you want to leave or that river currents can kill you and to escape them you’re not supposed to fight like a maniac to swim upstream but turn like a small bird on your back and spread the wings of your arms and let the river think you are cool with this killing all up until the river takes a sigh and that’s your sign to dive, cross, meet the shore once more.
Finalist Shannan Mann
JASON GRAY
Autumn, Amherst
A thousand small ignitions in the trees
With every stroke of the wind
Inside that fire waits a Cooper’s hawk
The opportunity will come Or won’tThe river clears its throat
Finalist Jason Gray
Love in the Time of Company Towns
IAN HALL
Nothing worth nothing ever happens after midnight. Coroners & dairy farmers alike have told me this, & you should believe every atom of it. But, then again, a god-given rule is humbled by its exception. Tonight, for instance, I am inevitable. You & me, your curls tasseling out like a 4-H project, are hoofing pell-mell down the mountainside to the birthing hips of the Big Sandy, hallooing there is no such joy in the pharmacy as on the road thereto. Boneheads to the letter of the law. Eyes amok with dilation, I want the deed to the way this swimming hole looks just now—all bluing & moonburnt. Vague twang of chum. The cattail astir like tooth-torn garters. Usually, I’m too gummed up in everydayness to appreciate this claptrap idyll. But right this second I need no convincing that both my feet are planted angelic in the heartland of the real. With ring fingers you fishhook
Finalist Ian Hall
my nose. Get a royal whiff of that, you say, & I mainline the menstrual zest of a river in July. Lo-fi
sublime. Water busks over the bosom of stones. Lusty crickets won’t take maybe for an answer. Tomorrow surely
there’ll be another frog-strangling rain. Too spongey to ply a trade, earn a troglodyte living, roofers & loggers might
mass here to fish, drink, lie, swap lore. Might connive against their foremen, some
litigious homeowner. & I too will be out another day’s greenback roughage. But this doesn’t peeve
I can always binge you through the billable hours. Thwack. I just went to palm
one of your glands petite, but the drowsy piles of rock we were idling against made a tattletale sound & with mal
came apart. We are side-by-side on the grass now, sides splitting. Chalk a line around us as we lay, & this’d be righ
tragic. More star-crossed than Heloise & Abelard. Still airy & elfin from the vertigo, you ask if those are the names
Finalist Ian Hall
of the teacher & student who got caught holding pagan angles in the supply closet at the vocational school. More
or less, I say, & course my hand up your spine like a Geiger counter—pausing above the pastoral inflections, the haute scoliosis, to bleep animatronic. Grinning, our fingers duet. We are close enough to know each other biblically. So close I can hear the gristle creak in your back when you move your mouth to mine. Now we are not talking swine futures or the Technicolor horrors that haunt the C-SPAN ticker. There is noise, but not a trifle of that. What homesteads between us: sighs, yips, small gallantries, air sacs daubed in ancestral gunk. Right now, there’s strictly this strep throat patter—hot, thoughtless. Like a gamboling lamb, you go to & fro. The flats of my feet sizzle with hookworm.
Finalist Ian Hall
My Academic Trainin Wants Me to Title This “Southern Past
TARA BAL
LLARD
but the poem happens at night, and I do not remember learning whether pastorals can take place after sundown, though at this point in our studies we realize the terms given to us we must wholly reject for a new language, while, between semesters, we gather at your aunt’s house on the front lawn where we sit on foldable chairs between siblings and cousins and nieces and nephews, and the day has long left us to a dark that cools the grass and relieves our skin, and the young ones manage the playlist from the front porch
Finalist Tara Ballard
but know to include Das EFX and Marvin Gaye, and it was just the other day
you and I were listening to Moten and Hartman redefine
The Black Outdoors: an outside where, they explain, there remains the sound of running, escape as forever verb— how (that / this) (happened / happens)
here where cotton fields are disguised as corn and the plantation stands an hour away, where white couples today have weddings and the bride who looks like me walks toward the Manor House to the predictable notes of Pachelbel’s Canon.
Finalist Tara Ballard
GREG SEVIK
Le Trappiste
They tore down a building to make a new building. I tore down my life to build a new life.
When they finished, they found a thirteenth-century cellar.
When I finished, I found that the digging had only begun.
They transformed the cellar into the coolest beer bar in Bruges.
I travel there with my stepdad, in the summer of my liberation.
Even underground, Gothic arches point toward God, toward Heaven, like pointed peaks in Belgian beer foam, frothy as fresh meringue.
The rough-hewn stones have held hands for 800 years.
NaPoMo 2025
The owner has set up a turntable, where he plays old records.
We listen to Miles Davis, “My Funny Valentine,” and order another round.
My stepdad takes my picture. I smile with a full beer. For my dating profile, I say.
He looks surprised, though I’ve been divorced a year.
One day, I will share my life again. Stones will hold hands. For now, I keep digging.
We taste the dubbels, we taste the tripels. We taste the browns and the blonds.
I think how my ex would have loved this place. The old jazz records. The low vaulted ceiling.
The tunes we heard, until we stopped listening. The things we built, till the stones crumbled apart.
Now the bar’s owner is getting agitated. The Brits in the corner are talking way too loud.
Why do they have to yell? he asks us, as if we could explain their Anglophone behavior.
Why do I play the records, he asks, if no one’s gonna listen to the music?
Finalist Greg Sevik
JENNIFER R. EDWARDS Hanky
My father’s handkerchief embarrassed me. He pulled it from his button-down chest or back left pocket to make a racket anytime, anywhere.
It was impossible to predict which blowing style he’d use. One like a strange Morse code leftover from Naval days, a long, deep clearing followed by four quick ones.
As if resurfacing and expelling water. Or a demon. Sometimes it was downright alarming, an elephant trumpeting over my saxophone or middle school chorus.
At how many movies did he wipe buttery fingers with his handkerchief then snore until I elbowed him? How many Batman movies are there now?
Never once, with bad traffic or backseat driving, did he honk in anger. But he sounded like a goose gone mad around cat hair. When he sneezed, his hanky would fill like a sail then settle.
Finalist Jennifer R. Edwards
We rarely realized he entered the kitchen until his nose interrupted us. During my only chore of folding laundry, I’d dump out hankies and Hanes undershirts until they were little igloos melting or dollops of whipped cream.
Little tents on the pole of my pointer. Delicate angel dresses. I thought even then about thinness and light’s lovely trickery. I folded them carefully like quilts in the dollhouse he built. One hankie had a small brownish stain
I never asked about. I piled them by his chest of drawers, on the makeshift metal shelf over the iron radiator. Maybe they were still warm when he cleaned off his Oldsmobile so early, even on those half-day Saturdays. Sometimes,
watching Westerns, a dusty cowboy returned and swooped from his horse to kiss his corseted woman. Dad’s hanky transformed into a bandana dabbing at his eyes. Mom spray-starched monogrammed hankies under asbestos-lined pipes. Recently,
I asked if Dad might want handkerchiefs at the nursing home. Mom cracked with kindness. Oh, Honey, he hasn’t used those in years. These months wiped clean away. She puts tissues near his good arm every day she visits.
IHLR NaPoMo 2025
Finalist Jennifer R. Edwards
FROM THE
Horse’s Mouth
a conversation about ballads, lineation, connections, and passivity with Katie Hartsock
IHLR: A striking element in your winning poem “Museums” is its form—a series of quatrains staggered across the page at regular intervals. How did you arrive at this shape?
HARTSOCK: In early drafts, the scope this poem wanted for itself felt precarious, as dizzying as some of its events. I needed a form to shape it, both in cutting what needed to go and creating the space of rhythmic mandates for the connections that weren’t yet there. I tried blank verse and free verse tercets, and I actually resisted the form that ended up inspiring the final version, unrhymed ballad stanzas, because I’d been using it often. I love how unrhymed ballad quatrains evoke the ballad’s history of mysterious narratives (from poems like “Sir Patrick Spens” and Hardy’s “The Workbox” to Emily Dickinson’s implosive reinvention of the form) and create a subterranean expectation for rhyme, which it then denies.
The poem is not strictly loyal to the ballad’s tetrameter/trimeter pattern; some pentameters remain from earlier drafts, and few lines are wholly iambic. But I hope this creates a tension between rhythmic order and disorder that serves the poem. The indentation allowed for a sense of motion, or uncertain meandering, almost like muddy footprints.
IHLR: Speaking of form, your lineation throughout the piece makes incredibly careful use of space. In moments like “they heard him coming way // too fast up the hill” and “Miraculous, the lack // of death,” the breaks often carry as much emotional weight as the words themselves—the silence of that gap, that pause, conveying what words alone cannot. What poets have inspired your approach to lineation?
IHLR NaPoMo 2025
photo by Lisa Mancuso Horn
HARTSOCK: Linda Gregerson (her enjambments, but also her indenting and moving stanzas away from the left margin), Laura Kasischke (the first line of her poem “Fatima” may be one of my all-time favorite lines/enjambments), Lorna Goodison (one of our greatest praise poets), Louise Glück (especially in Averno) . . . and that’s just the women poets whose names begin with L! And with most of whom I’ve been so lucky to study. It’s hard to choose; I feel like I learn something about lineation from every poet I love, but I’ll add some old favorites—Robert Hass, Constantine Cavafy (even in translation), H.D., Carol Ann Duffy (I love to teach her “Eurydice” in my mythology class after we’ve read Virgil’s and Ovid’s accounts of Orpheus), Paul Muldoon (“Cuba” takes my breath away)—and some newer: Ama Codjoe, Natalie Diaz, Diane Seuss, Tyehimba Jess.
It’s fun to study lineation with students in the work of the Modernists, where the smokeplumed steam train of free verse arrives roaring at the station. Or maybe meter is the steam train, and free verse is electric or diesel? Hmmm. . . . Anyway, it’s hard for us who grew up with free verse as the dominant mode to really appreciate how exciting it must have been to decide for yourself when to break the line, instead of working toward a number of feet, especially with rhyme in mind. It’s great when students understand how some of Marianne Moore’s poems can look like free verse, but are scaffolded by strict syllabics. Many of my students are equally drawn to form and free verse; they like the challenge and the skeleton of form when they realize how differently it asks them to work than free verse.
IHLR: The narrative of “Museums” winds through a variety of settings, taking the reader from an OB appointment to an automobile crash and, soon after, an air show. What unexpected connections did the writing uncover that helped tie these locations together?
HARTSOCK: There was such a swirl of events and locations that insisted they belonged in this poem; the work was more about choosing what to cut, to let a better clarity of connections emerge. Initially, there were more details about the OB appointment and the Paul Simon song. And I was reading, perhaps a bit obsessively, about the young man killed in the motorcycle crash, and from details in one article, I learned he had lived less than a mile from me, pretty much in our neighborhood; I could even tell which house was his family’s. Sometime after his death, my young sons and I were riding bikes past their house, which sits just where the road starts to decline into a small hill. I yelled to my sons on their
From the Horse’s Mouth
bicycles, “Slow down!” and then I saw a man—I assume he was the young man’s father— in the front yard. He heard me and saw us: I felt like an accidental torture to him, a cruel reminder of his grief. What if someone had shouted at his son to slow down?
But as you can maybe tell, this part of the story lends itself more to prose. I tried to find ways to include it in the poem, but once I took this and those other elements out, the cohesion without them became clear.
IHLR: “Museums” contains multiple allusions to well-known artistic works, including an epigraph from W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” an aside on The Hunt for Red October, and a concluding image borrowed from Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion.” How is the poem in conversation with these texts?
HARTSOCK: Auden’s poem is one of my great beloveds, deeply etched. When I pulled over and crossed the road and stood by the young man, I saw the terrible distance between the site of the motorcycle’s impact against the van and where he landed. Almost immediately, Auden’s line—“something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky”—appeared in my overwhelmed head and heart. In that poem, Icarus falls and drowns, and no one notices or cares; in contrast, I was preoccupied with what I’d witnessed, and one of the ways I tried to lift myself out of my darkened mood was listening to Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion.” The concluding image is not from the song itself, which is vague in its evocations of grief and hope, but from an article I read after becoming curious to know more about it. The title, which is so lovely (and reminds me of Demeter and Persephone), has a strange origin; Simon took it from the name of a dish, which he saw on a menu, that contained both chicken and egg. That oddness, and the sense that the title’s source was almost incompatible with the song’s beauty, became the way for the poem to end.
When my son, who had seen The Hunt for Red October by the time he was six (my husband’s decision—I was not consulted!), suggested that the Cold-War-era Russian helicopter at the air show had ended up in America because of someone defecting (as Sean Connery’s Russian naval captain does with his submarine in the film), it immediately became part of the poem taking shape in my head—and that was before the MiG crashed! My current manuscript, The Last Crusade, takes its title and touchstone from the 1989 Spielberg film, so I’d already been using a movie to think about heroism and boyhood.
IHLR NaPoMo 2025
IHLR: The language in this poem shifts between two distinct states: lethargy, á la the speaker sitting “in a funk” and the neighbors “walking dully along,” and energy, as in the animated repurposing of “something amazing, / a boy falling out of the sky.” What role does the tension between activity and passivity play in the poem?
HARTSOCK: Passivity shares its root with such a range of words: passion, patience, a patient. All of them connect to the Latin root pati: “to suffer,” as in, “to undergo or endure.” (It’s one of my favorite etymologies: my first poetry collection is titled Bed of Impatiens). I think the poem wants to blur typical distinctions: we can seem active (the ploughman in Brueghel) and actually be passive, in that we are simply enduring our usual tasks without engaging anything. And we can seem passive (a driver at a red light staring off) but be quite active (she is balancing several intense concerns at once). The passive is usually the inevitable voice of accidents and disasters. We say they “happen” when there is no easily identifiable subject who makes them happen; they just do.
IHLR: After witnessing the automobile accident that resulted in a young man’s death, the speaker notes that “an ambulance / carried off his shaking, // though I took some home with me too.” Talk to me about this moment and what the shaking means to you.
HARTSOCK: It’s amazing how reverberations can translate bodies. How you can physically sense your tires losing their grip on an icy road below you, or how a frog can feel your footsteps through earth, approaching the bank of his creek, and so he hops in. It’s less explainable, but when I saw the young man’s foot shaking, I felt that shaking in my own body. Buzzing. And when I would remember it, I’d feel it again. It might be a way of responding to Auden’s critique of the human capacity to ignore others’ suffering—I couldn’t ignore what I saw, and it stayed with me. But I also had to find a way to move past it, to be the ship “that had somewhere to get” and sail on, if not entirely calmly.
—JENNESSA HESTER column editor
From the Horse’s Mouth
In the Saddle with
SPRING ULMER
Poets are conscientious by nature, but few channel their conscience into their poetics as seamlessly as Spring Ulmer —a poet, essayist, translator, photographer, scholar, critic, and traveler. Her commitment to resistance began when she was nine and bicycled thousands of miles across the Greek countryside, sleeping in barns and on floors. Her father, a conscientious objector arrested during the civil rights movement, had urged her to live among and learn from Greek peasants. As a teenager, she fell in love with the poetry of Yannis Ritsos, who endured imprisonment under the Greek military junta for his political and poetic convictions. In 2020, she was awarded an NEA fellowship to translate Ritsos’s work from 1950–60, a project forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse under the title Exercises.
I first met Spring when she traveled to Pakistan as a guest lecturer. Through poetry, photography, and a warmth that won over even the wary, she led a week-long writing workshop that inspired such poignant pieces—many of which grappled with the complex emotions of love and resentment that non-Americans feel toward the United States.
That was nearly a decade ago. Since then, Spring has remained a dear friend—one whose brilliance, integrity, and courage continue to inspire. How heartening it is to share a desk, a glimpse of the workspace of this kairotic poet, whose many achievements now include the Dorset Prize (2022), selected by Diane Seuss.
—NAVEED ALAM, column editor
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My mother made this desk from a slab of pinewood; a tree must have come down. She used two stockier slabs for the base, then commissioned a blacksmith friend to craft the L-braces that would bolt the slab legs of the base in place. The giant bolts were for the child I hoped to adopt; she wanted the desk to be safe and not collapse on him. I wanted the desk left unfinished, but my mother said the wood would gray and stain. She said I would need to make sure it held its shape. I accompanied her to her friends’ place (because they had an empty guest house where the fumes wouldn’t poison anyone but us) to shellac it. The shellac made me sick, but the desk is what remains of my mother’s love. It is thick, has shape, is knotty. She loved a good burl. The bolts unscrew, freeing the braces and slab legs. My mother handed me a container in which to keep the right-sized ratchet set together with the loose bolts, and I carried the container
nd the three separate slabs back to where I then lived (in another state) in the back of my truck. I always love bolting the desk back together. It’s something heavy, somehing real, a piece of the woods in which I was reared. I wrote two books at this desk. I translated Yannis Ritsos on it. It has housed me and my imagination, and simultaneously grounded me, keeping me in my place. My son and I live in my mother’s house now. My mother has lost her memory. I work at her desk—a piece of flat plywood perched atop file cabinets, my beautiful pine desk behind me, facing south. There is a photo of my father on the pine desk now, one I mean to get framed. In it, my father holds a walking stick he carved himself (tapering it down) in his right gnarled hand and sits on stone he quarried by plug and feather. The pine slab desk is a memory. It stands in place of my mother’s memory. Who knows who I am in her place, at her desk? She was so pleased to make that pine desk for me. My father said as much. Being a mother cannot be separated from what it means to give. It’s winter. A logger friend sometimes comes with his horses and drags logs out of the woods. The things I’ve been bestowed that matter are things my parents either cultivated in me or made by hand—a pinewood desk, a wire bird with a fossil head, the stone house my son and I now live in. My son sets a stone in a walking stick that he’s carved. He inlays the stone perfectly. I gift him some walnut oil for polishing. Lastly, he robs a rubber cane nub from the foot of my late father’s walking stick to skid-proof his. The pine desk is not just a desk; it’s a gift. If literature is not a gift, Lewis Hyde argues, it’s not literature, just commodity.
the Saddle
Contributors
Tara Ballard, a doctoral candidate of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has published in The Atlantic, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, Michigan Quarterly Review, North American Review, New York Quarterly, Salamander, and elsewhere. She is an associate editor for Prairie Schooner and an affiliate editor for Alaska Quarterly Review. Ballard says she wrote “My Academic Training Wants Me to Title This ‘Southern Pastoral’” after she and her husband attended his family reunion in northern Alabama: “Together, we talked a great deal about what we learned from his elders and how their experiences and the experiences of those who came before them converse with what we have studied, and wrestled with, in our doctoral programs. In this regard, this poem would not exist if not for the conversation held between Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten as part of The Black Outdoors, a working group and speaker series hosted by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, which is made available to the public on YouTube.”
Lindsay D’Andrea’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been featured or are forthcoming in several publications, including The Baltimore Review, Ploughshares, Puerto del Sol, Potomac Review, and Harpur Palate. She has been named a finalist for North American Review’s 2025 James Hearst Poetry Prize. She earned her MFA from Iowa State University’s program in Creative Writing and Environment in 2014 and currently lives in the Philadelphia area with her family. About her poem, “Ferragosto,” D’Andrea says, “I was in the middle of planning a trip to Italy when I found out I was pregnant with my daughter and she was due around March, the time when I was hoping to book my flight. The poem is about
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the sorrow and ecstasy of that moment, and I wanted it to speak to the various sacrifices all women make when they become mothers. It’s a defining moment, however many times it happens. Life often feels like a series of closing and opening doors—growth seasons and fertile windows move this way, as they do in the poem. When I first wrote ‘Ferragosto,’ I was also thinking about the allure of escape—what it means to stay or to go and how we carry such decisions with us. I worked with this poem for a long time and made several additions and deletions, killed a few darlings, kept it close for a long time. Sometimes when I read it, I feel as if I am still unpacking its cascade of imagery. It’s nice to come to a poem with the detachment of a reader, even after spending so much time with it.”
About her other poem, “Fossil Record Reveals Early Cambrian Origins,” D’Andrea adds, “Most of my poems start out written by hand—in journals or on napkins or scraps of paper slotted into books. I don’t immediately take every first draft of a poem forward, for whatever reason. ‘Fossil Record’ is one of those I started in an old journal some time ago and recently rediscovered. There was something in it that struck me this time. I guess I wrote the first draft around seven or eight years ago, but something was not available to me at that time to allow me to finish it. I often feel that it takes me years and years to ‘write’ my poems, although most of that time is not spent writing but processing. This poem is a testament to that. Sometimes it’s best to just let a poem wander for a bit, then make its return to tell you where it has been and what it has learned.”
Jennifer R. Edwards’s collection Unsymmetrical Body (Finishing Line Press, 2022) was an Eric Hoffer honorable mention, First Horizon finalist, and Boston Author’s Club Julia Ward Howe Award finalist. She has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, the NEPC Amy Lowell Prize, and conference fellowships. She's a speech-language pathologist, MFA candidate at Bennington Writing Seminars, and board member of the NH Poetry Society. Her poems are available in anthologies and journals, including The Shore, Beaver Magazine, RHINO, ELJ, MER, One Art, and Terrain.
About her poem, “Hanky,” Edwards says, “This poem was recently written and sparked when I was searching for a good photo of my father to post for Father’s
Contributors
Day. I found a picture taken at my second wedding that I had never looked closely at: my second husband and I beaming at each other while my father is turning away to find his seat and pulling out his handkerchief. I just couldn’t get over that picture: how we were all holding onto something and how familiar yet far away that fluid movement of my father and his handkerchiefs seemed. My father has significantly changed in the past year with progressing dementia, and writing this poem was a way that, out of nowhere, I somehow felt and expressed that grief. During the revision process, I tried to simplify and take out details, yet I found myself asking more questions of myself and my family that truly can’t be answered. The monogrammed handkerchiefs are gone now. It’s challenging to write highly personal poems and hard to end them because you want to keep revising based on new insights or an appreciation you never had during youth. I move swiftly at times between the past and present, both in my poems and in real life. I like when poems I read or write show us how time layers like that and becomes thick with love or possibility. If I let myself write long enough, all my poems are odes or eulogies.”
Jason Gray is the author of Radiation King (Lost Horse Press, 2019) and Photographing Eden (Ohio University Press, 2008). He hosts the podcast Drunk as a Poet on Payday.
About his poem, “Autumn, Amherst,” Gray says, “On my way to a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in October 2023, I stopped in Amherst, Massachusetts, to attend the last night of the Tell It Slant Poetry Festival at Emily Dickinson’s house. While I was walking around the grounds before the evening’s reading, I noticed what I believed to be a Cooper’s hawk in one of the giant trees near the house. Later that month, during my residency, walking through the woods at peak foliage time, I remembered that hawk and wrote this poem.”
Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, Southeast Review, and other publications.
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About his poem, “Love in the Time of Company Towns,” Hall says, “This poem is concerned with the unkempt forms of intimacy and kinship—the peculiar kinds of kindness—that people under duress often practice.”
Katie Hartsock's second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse Press), was listed as one of Kirkus Review’s Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work appears widely, in journals such as Ecotone, Threepenny Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Image, and RHINO. She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.
About her poems, Hartsock states, “Sometimes all the stars are there, but you’re not sure what the constellation is. Sometimes each star seems a ‘bad star,’ the etymological meaning behind our word ‘disaster.’ I started to write ‘Museums’ after the series of events described in that poem happened, but the order and the form, as well as what to include and what to leave out, eluded me until the unrhymed ballad quatrains (and a balance of quoting both W.H. Auden and Paul Simon) helped the material constellate itself. Similarly, I had worked on ‘There Is the Sea, And Who Can Drain It Dry?’ for years, until couplets shaped it. I love to teach Aeschylus’s Oresteia and to hear students’ varied responses to Clytemnestra, whose character can still generate so much awe: awe as in both awesome and awful, both inspiring and terrifying. I find it fascinating that over 2,000 years ago, such a character spoke this line, full of its awful relevance to our oceans and climate awareness today.”
Read more about Hartsock’s work in this issue’s FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH, pp. 50-53.
Julia Kolchinsky (formerly Dasbach) is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother (Kent State University Press, 2019), Don't Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023), and PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025), a finalist of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. When the World Stopped Touching, a collaborative collection with Luisa Muradyan, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2027. She is Assistant Professor of English and creative writing at Denison University.
Contributors
About her poem, “Skin Hunger,” Kolchinsky says, “I was reading Melissa Febos’s Girlhood where she describes how many people suffer from ‘skin hunger,’ which is a deep longing and aching desire for physical contact with another person. At the time, I was going through a separation from my children's father and navigating both the longing for romantic touch and a desire not to be constantly touched by my children as a newly single mother. This poem was a way of understanding, finding, and ultimately choosing myself, of getting my own body back as flesh not dependent on the bodies of others.”
Shannan Mann is the founding editor of ONLY POEMS. Her work is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2024. She has been awarded or placed for the Palette Love & Eros Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, and Auburn Witness Prize, among others. Her poems appear in Poetry Daily, Black Warrior Review, Poet Lore, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Her essays appear in Tolka Journal and Going Down Swinging; they have been awarded the Alta Lind Cook Prize and the Irene Adler Essay Prize. She also translates Sanskrit poetry. Find her at: shannanmann.com.
About her poem, “On my first mention of divorce,” Mann says, “This poem is part of a larger collection (meditation?) on divorce and joy, something I feel is hardly spoken about especially in relation to single moms. I hope that other women entering or exiting similar places in their lives can find some touchstones of comfort in my words.”
Greg Sevik is a poet, translator, and English professor at the Community College of Baltimore County. His poems and translations have been published in Avalon Literary Review, Big Windows Review, Ekphrastic Review, Inventory, Vagabond City, and elsewhere. He is working on his first book.
About his poem, “Le Trappiste,” Sevik says, “The summer after my divorce, I spent a lot of time traveling and visiting friends and family, including a trip to Belgium with my stepdad. I jokingly referred to it as ‘Summer of Greg,’ after ‘Summer of George’ from an episode of Seinfeld. It was a time for healing and reflection and planning my next steps in life—a lot of ‘digging,’ as the poem says. One of the
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highlights of the Belgium trip was a fantastic beer bar called Le Trappiste; my stepdad and I went there every night we were in Bruges. When I returned to Baltimore, I recognized the resonance between the accidental excavation of that medieval cellar in 1973 and the internal excavation I was engaged in. Once I came up with the poem’s first two lines, setting up that comparison, the rest of the poem formed itself quickly in my mind. It draws its imagery from that wonderful place—and its tone from my sadness and uncertainty about what would come next.”
Spring Ulmer is the author of Benjamin’s Spectacles (selected by Sonia Sanchez for Kore Press’s 2007 First Book Award); The Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay Press, 2009); Bestiality of the Involved (Etruscan Press, 2020), and Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April (selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of Tupelo Press’s 2022 Dorset Prize). Her translations of Yannis Ritsos’s Exercises is forthcoming from Ugly Ducking Presse. She lives in upstate New York with her son. For more about Ulmer’s writing process, see this issue’s IN THE SADDLE, pp. 54-57.
Contributors in “In Poetry” include Jose Angel Araguz (19.2), Joe Betz (23.1), Eleanor Mary Boudreau (21.4), Jacob Boyd (24.2), Jerry Bradley (17.2), Doug Paul Case (18.2), Makensi Ceriani (25.1), Alan Chazaro (19.2), Jennifer S. Cheng (19.2), Tiana Clark (19.2), Grant Clauser (22.2), Morris Collins (18.2), Sarah Cooper (22.2), Todd Davis (21.2), Samantha DeFlitch (NaPoMo 2022), Dante Di Stefano (17.6), Ryler Dustin (17.6), Jaclyn Dwyer (17.2), Sara Fetherolf (18.6), Henrietta Goodman (22.1), Melinda Susan Goodman (25.2), Ruth Goring (19.1), Clemonce Heard (22.2), Shelly Holder (NaPoMo 2023), Michael Hurley (17.2), Tyehimba Jess (14.2), Taylor Johnson (19.2), Ted Kooser (11.2), Tanis MacDonald (18.1), Chloe Martinez (23.1), Walt McDonald (24.2), Becka Mara McKay (19.6), Zackary Medlin (26.1), Jessica Morey-Collins (18.6), Travis Mossotti (24.1), Cindy Juyoung Ok (22.2), Ottavia Paluch (24.1), Emily Pérez (22.2), Alexa Quezada (22.4), Doug Ramspeck (18.6), Katherine Reigel (20.4), Anna Sandy-Elrod (22.2), Christopher Shipman (NaPoMo 2022), Christina Stoddard (17.2), Anne-Marie Thompson (NaPoMo 2022), Lindsay Tigue (17.2), John Walser (18.6), and Bessie Flores Zaldívar (24.1).
Contributors
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.
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TTU English Department, Chair Michael Faris
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