Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share and examine their work, produced and moderated by John Gillespie. Episode 2 features Holly Iglesias and Landon Godfrey. Holly reads “Innocence Abroad,” a finalist for the Charles Simic Prize from Hole in the Head Review," and Landon reads “Junk Drawer” from Inventory of Doubts. INNOCENCE ABROAD By Holly Iglesias Travel in Europe forced me to write smaller than ever, smaller than my long surname forced into small boxes on job applications. Seated in a second - class car, window ajar, ashtrays full, I jotted down snippets of conversation and learned to tuck the notebook in my pocket and look straight ahead when police boarded the train at Budapest or Burgos. Europe taught me to use pencil instead of pen, a four - inch stub to write aerograms, poems on index cards, sketches on receipts, each tossed into a string bag from which they sometimes escaped down a narrow street and into the gutter. Surely that’s what they meant when they said Europe was charming, but it was more haunted than charming, each meander passing a vacant lot where a cathedral once stood, a rail platform where children were loaded onto freight cars, docks where ancestors lined up to depart, praying never to return. No, it had to be pencil, soft lead, ink too permanent, ink a stain we could not bear, so young, so young. JUNK DRAWER By Landon Godfrey Death is the opposite of everything. —Susan Sontag After I die, please let your new wife throw this detritus away. Allow these things to become holes in your heart. I promise you won’t need my desiccated rubber bands, extra buttons to the ratty cardigans I wore around when cooking gardening reading that you’ll have given to a charity shop, tags from my pied dog lost in Vermont so many summers ago, local merchants’ logo-screaming magnets I wouldn’t let you put on the refrigerator, the odd champagne cork, notes about errands I either did or didn’t do, and the rest of it, all the flotsam and jetsam from the ocean of moments we weren’t paying attention to because like everyone else we thought this world would last forever. Let your wife change the drawer liner and lay in her own provisions for the duration, until such time as this little kitchen-corner-tucked coffin’s opened for the next viewing.
Holly Iglesias has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Edward Albee Foundation. Her poetry collections are Souvenirs of Shrunken World, Angles of Approach, and Sleeping Things. She is working on an intergenerational memoir in prose fragments that is tentatively entitled Theories of Flight.
Landon Godfrey’s collection of poems, Inventory of Doubts, was selected by Dana Levin for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. She is also the author of Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown (Cider Press Review), chosen by David St. John for the Cider Press Review Book Award, and two limited-edition letterpress chapbooks, In the Stone (funded by a Regional Artist Project Grant) and Spaceship (Somnambulist Tango Press). Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Copper Nickel, Adroit Journal, Studium in Polish translation, Best New Poets, Verse Daily, and other places. She has received fellowships from the NEA, North Carolina Arts Council, and Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences.
Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Get in touch at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com
You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/. And, on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org