“I can only say this: If [the man who shot the Sutherland Springs
shooter] didn’t have a gun, instead of having 26 dead, you would
have had hundreds more dead. So that’s the way I feel about it.
[Gun control is] [n]ot going to help.”
A poem is not a drafted plan; it is a balance between forgetting the truth and understanding it. April is National Poetry Month, and The Iowa Review is excited to continue with our annual online feature. For each day in April, we will publish a poem online by writers who demonstrate how the truth is composed of conflicting ideas, like what makes us laugh the hardest breaks our hearts the hardest, that terror has a great sorrow to it, and that exploiting the ugliness is just as important as discovering the beauty.
Amanda Nadelberg is the author of three books of poetry: Isa the Truck Named Isadore, selected by Lisa Jarnot as winner of the 2005 Slope Editions Book Prize; Bright Brave Phenomena (Coffee House Press, 2012); and Songs from a Mountain (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, and Chicago Review, among other places, and in 2016 she was a columnist in residence for SFMOMA’s Open Space. She is a graduate of Carleton College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held Truman Capote and Teaching-Writing Fellowships, and where she returned in the summer of 2017 to teach a graduate poetry workshop. A recipient of a grant from The Fund for Poetry and an advisor to The Song Cave, she is originally from Boston and lives in Oakland.
As an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, Myriam Gurba developed an eating and exercise disorder in the wake of a sexual assault. One day, she passes out in the school gym. As she comes to, an employee asks if she’s epileptic. She replies, “I’m Mexican.”
It is easy to love a pig in a nightgown.
See how he sleeps, white flannel
straining his neck at the neckhole.
His body swells and then deflates.
The gown is nothing to be ashamed of, only
the white clay of moonlight smeared
over his hulk, original clothing, the milk
of his loneliness. The flickering candle
of a dream moves his warty eyelids.
All sleeping things are children.
