IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE  on

Lynn Emanuel
The Sleeping

I have imagined all this:
In 1940 my parents were in love
And living in the loft on West 10th
Above Mark Rothko who painted cabbage roses
On their bedroom walls the night they got married.

I can guess why he did it.
My mother’s hair was the color of yellow apples
And she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas.

I was not born yet.  I was remote as starlight.
It is hard for me to imagine that
My parents made love in a roomful of roses
And I wasn’t there.

But now I am.  My mother is blushing.
This is the wonderful thing about art.
It can bring back the dead.  It can wake the sleeping
As it might have late that night
When my father and mother made love above Rothko
Who lay in the dark thinking  Roses, Roses, Roses.
​

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning  literary biographer, essayist, and poet. Her work challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and over-population have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history by researching the lives of women. She obtained her MFA in poetry from New York University, and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. Dunkle wrote the first full-length biography on Charmian London, Jack London's wife, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2020. Her fourth collection of poems, West : Fire : Archive was published by The Center for Literary Publishing in 2021.  Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry and Translation Director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.