Iris Jamahl Dunkle
The Well Was an Eye
Deep as a secret. Deep in the back woods.
Off-limits. Underneath its rotted wood
cover lived a colony of spiders,
each big as a grown man’s fist, pulsing in
the dark. The well was a secret we were
drawn to: a place to pour out our darkness.
We spoke of bodies we wanted to touch
without knowing where or how. In the back
woods, we were living in the dark, pulsing,
waiting for our new adult skin and hearts
and minds and tits to grow in. And even
though the well offered no bucket, we were
thirsty for its tincture of secret desires.
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is the author of Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017), Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013), and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (WordTech Communications, 2015). Her work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market 2013, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. She was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
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