Copyright © 2009 by Mike Burwell, Editor
Cover art: Paxson Woelber
Design and composition: Paxson Woelber
ISSN 2152-6451 (print)
ISSN 2152-4610 (online)
Published by
Chipmunk Press
Anchorage, Alaska
www.cirquejournal.com
All future rights to material published in the Cirque
are retained by the individual authors and artists.
email: [email protected]
Permission to print “Cut, Then Chase,” “At the End of a Hard Day,”
and “So Now Then” from Hollow Out, courtesy of New Rivers Press
http://www.mnstate.edu/newriverspress/
2
Cirque
A Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim
______________________________________________________
Vol. 1 No. 1 Winter Solstice 2009
Anchorage, Alaska
3
From the Editor Welcome to Issue #1 of Cirque. Cirque, published in Anchorage, Alaska, is a
regional journal created to share the best writing of the region with the rest of the
world. Inside this sphere there are a few journals and outside of it there are a lot.
Meeting the need for a journal to get the art of this region out to a wider audience,
Cirque’s editorial mission is simple: to offer fine writing from the North Pacific Rim. In
Alaska, some existing journals have recently disappeared and others take on
submissions from the entire U.S. and Canada. In the Net world, there are hundreds of
e-journals that have a disembodied cast to them. Editors from all over the globe
editing a collection of writers from everywhere. Many of these journals have strong
readerships and identities; many do not. Writing comes out of place, and Cirque speaks
from and for the North in order to articulate the essence of this place; at the same time,
Cirque affirms voices with international vitality and impact.
Our editorial and geographical boundaries include (and are limited to) writers
living in Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Hawaii, Yukon Territory, Alberta,
British Columbia, and Chukotka. Two rich issues a year will draw exclusively from
emerging and established writers living in the North Pacific Rim. If you meet the
geographic test, send your short stories, poems, creative nonfiction, translations, plays,
reviews of first books, interviews, photographs, and artwork to
[email protected]. The submission deadline for Issue #2--Summer Solstice
2010 is April 30, 2010. Cirque is published free on-line and hard copies are print-on-
demand.
My thanks to Anne Coray and Steve Kahn at NorthShore Press for helping me name the
journal, to Randol Bruns for helping me forge ahead with my call for submissions, to
Buffy McKay for leaping into the editing, to Janet Levin for her magnificent photos and
11th-hour editorial help, to Paxson Woelber for his cover art and web design and
general reassurance that all the online processes would actually be realized, and,
finally, to all the writers here who have offered their work for your delight.
This issue is dedicated to Fairbanks novelist and poet, Marjorie Kowalski Cole, who was
recently struck down by cancer. We are fortunate to be able to include two of her
poems in this the inaugural issue of Cirque.
Mike Burwell, Editor
Anchorage, Alaska
Winter Solstice 2009
4
CirqueA Literary Journal for the North Pacific Rim
______________________________________________________
Vol. 1 No. 1 Winter Solstice 2009
ContentsNonFiction
Seeking Spirit Jeff Fair……………... 7
Joel’s Ashes Jim Sweeney……….. 12
Jaden Is Calling Sandra Kleven…….... 13
Neighbors Russ Van Paepeghem 15
On An Early Winter Day, An Abundance of Bugs Bill Sherwonit………. 16
Ptarmigan Hunting in Alaska: A Love Story Steve Taylor………… 19
Plays
At Sea Nancy Lord…………… 21
Mother & Child in a Garden Peter Porco………….. 27
Poetry
Water Marjorie Kowalski Cole 28
Wildlife on Old Wood Road ……..………………… 29
It’s All Downhill From Here John Baalke………….. 29
Fresh Water Randol Bruns………… 30
Catching My King ……………………….. 30
Anchorage City Poems #52 Alexandra Appel…….. 32
Home Front Marilyn Borell………... 31
Walking Alee of Wild Roses Carolyn Edelman…..… 33
Gustavus, Alaska, Pop. 101 Marion Boyer………… 34
Bear Photo Michael Earl Craig…. 35
Bluebirds ……………………….. 35
El Agua Gretchen Diemer…...... 36
Garden Party Sherry Eckrich………... 37
Mountain Lion Jo Going……………… 38
Again Winter ……..…………………. 38
Accretions Eric Heyne……………. 39
Found ……………………….. 40
Winter Ptarmigan Ann Dixon……………. 41
Sunday, 12/19/04 7:45AM B. Hutton……………... 42
The Hunter Erling Friis-Baastad…… 41
Norma’s Cove Amy Otto Larsen….….. 43
Fool’s Lake ………………………... 43
Old Tom Brings Water into the World Ernestine Hayes……… 44
5
Old Tom’s Hands ………………………… 45
Tribute Janet Levin……………. 46
Freezeout Creek Sean Patrick Hill ………. 48
Out the Back Window Deb Liggett……………. 49
Storm ………………………… 49
Nesting Chronology Joan Kane…………….. 50
The Fire ………………………… 50
September 12, 2001 Susheila Khera………… 51
Pushing Off at Dusk ………………………… 51
Majesty Gone Marie Lundstrom……... 52
Perspectives ………………………… 52
Climbing Lazy Mountain Jason Marvel………….. 53
In Your Snowflake Dream David McElroy………… 54
In My Deli Dream ………………………… 54
April, Austen, Anchorage Buffy McKay…………… 55
How Spring Travels in Alaska ………………………… 56
The Place Where We Live Rachel Mehl…………… 56
A Memorial Perhaps John Morgan………….. 57
Counting Caribou Crossings— Prudhoe Bay, Alaska…………………….. 57
Falling Doug Pope…………… 58
The Wedding Night Vic Cavalli…………….. 59
Green lake Mark Muro……………. 60
Spaghetti western ………………………… 61
Wreck Beach Jon Wesick…………..… 61
Pentimento Pamela Porter ………… 62
Eriophorum Debbie Nigro………….. 62
Beastly Night Steve Treacy………….. 63
Brown Mare Paul Winkel……………. 63
Aid and Comfort Tonja Woelber……….. 64
Remembering Harding Lake Nancy Woods…………. 64
The soul like water, will find a place to go Kathleen Tarr…………. 65
I wore cowboy boots to work today Scott Banks……………. 66
Eve in Homer, Alaska Cinthia Ritchie………… 67
Destruction Bay, Yukon ………………………… 67
Interviews
Kelsea Habecker Hollowed Out Mary Huyck Mulka…… 68
Photos and Art
Westchester Lagoon Rebecca Goodrich……. 37
Raven and Eagle Robin Hiersche……….. 67
The Gorosh Pile Rick James…………….. 61
Capri-Leaf N. Q. Nguyen…………. 53
Fallen ………………………... 31
Paxson Woelber's Alaska Collection PW..38, 43, 44, 51, 65, 66, 74, 77
All Remaining Photographs ……..Janet Levin………
6
Nonfiction
Jeff Fair
Seeking Spirit
Princess Royal Island off the blue Pacific coast of
Canada: one thousand square miles of the most remote,
impenetrable, uninhabited, mountain-barricaded, fog-
choked monsoon-drenched wilderness the human spirit
could possibly hope to find on any shore of this precious
continent. Uninhabited? Not entirely true. Deep in
these darkling woods dwells the mystical spirit bear.
Obscure and mysterious as the snow leopard, this
creature haunts the last significant tract of unviolated
temperate rainforest on earth, here in western British
Columbia. The local Tsimshians know it as Moksgm'ol,
"white bear." Big medicine. Others call it snow bear, or
ghost bear. But ghost of whom? Spirit of what? We
hope to find out.
September 10, Day 1
Ten of us rendezvous at the head of a long inlet
in the interior of this island wilderness. Together we
comprise a research expedition under the auspices of
Canada's Valhalla Wilderness Society and the Great Bear
Foundation headquartered down in Montana. We are
here ostensibly to collect information and observations
of this animal and its environment to help justify the
establishment of a provincial park preserve on the
southern half of this island—a sanctuary for the spirit
bear. All appears in order except (I note) for an annoying
profusion of photographic gear dangling from the necks,
hands, and packs of my compatriots.
We plunge immediately into the rainforest, a
dark jungle, green and dripping, ambiance of moist
decay. When we strike the creek we walk upstream along
its shallows following strings of wolf tracks and the
footprints of bears: broad, humanlike impressions with
the big toes on the outside (indicative of a more stable
species). We investigate piles of bear
droppings, humanlike extrusions of recycled
berries and fruits and other delicacies indecipherable to a
man with a stick under field conditions. In the pools of
the creek, water clear as glass, we watch dozens of dull-
colored chum salmon, long as my arm.
The bear we are looking for is known to science
as Ursus americanus kermodei, the Kermode bear, named
by the New York Zoological Society for a Canadian
museum curator who produced the first verified
specimens, D.O.A. A race of our common black bear, the
Kermode is special for its odd color forms. One in ten
may appear in a white, orange or pinto coat. Colors may
alternate through generations; mixed litters occur. The
pure white creatures—the spirit bears—are not albino,
but simply a ghostly white. Some say perhaps only a few
dozen exist. Science knows little about their uniqueness,
having lost interest in 1928 when the Kermode was
officially demoted to subspecies status.
How did they get here? According to scientific
theory, the white bear was produced by random genetic
mutation in the black bear's genes. According to
Tsimshian legend, the white bear was created on purpose
by Raven, here on this island at the beginning of time.
Neither hypothesis has yet been conclusively refuted.
At a bend in the creek we encounter our first
bear, a conventional black model on the opposite bank.
Sudden clamor of zippers, snaps, parting velcro, bayonet
mounts engaging, tinkle of lens caps in the gravel,
strategic flourish of tripods: the artistes at their work. The
bear of course disappears. Glum disappointment among
the photographers.
Half a mile farther, we take our stand. Someone
saw a white bear on this exact spot two weeks ago. The
photographers unpack. We sit. We wait. We watch for
pale shadows in the bush.
7
Before dark we walk back downstream. At the
mouth of the creek I speak with Wayne McCrory, chief
biologist and leader of this expedition. His vigor belies
his fifty years. He wears a black fisherman's cap over a
pile of dark curls, and the bear biologist's beard: black,
curly, a bit feral about the edges. Part Scotch, part Irish,
part bloody English, he is a patriot of Canada--of the land
itself, if not always the government. His countenance has
a tired sadness about it, reminiscent of a face I've seen
somewhere before. Then I remember where: an old gray
daguerreotype of one Henry Thoreau.
Too few salmon today, McCrory explains. The
black bears are off in the woods eating the last of the
berry crop. Besides that, he and a pair of film makers in
our crew observed the tracks of two grizzly bears this
afternoon, one of them quite large. And what might the
grizzlies be eating? Well they might be eating black
bears, says McCrory. Can't expect the spirit bears to be
showing their faces with that kind of company about.
We proceed by inflatable Zodiac to base camp
aboard the Ocean Light, a classy 67-foot wooden ketch
anchored in the bay, charter captain Tom Ellison's
contribution to the effort. Not your typical backcountry
bivouac, but not bad, not bad.
Day 2
Blue skies overhead, stout coffee steaming from
the galley stove. Salmon leap nervously in the bay,
waiting for rain to swell the creeks for that final uphill
run. A single fish rockets out of the water and falls home
like a slab of meat, five, six, seven times in succession.
We sneak back into the lovely gloom.
Untroubled by fire for obvious reasons, this forest of rain
has reigned over the landscape for ten thousand years
since the glaciers retreated, the warm rains began to fall,
and Raven created the white bear. We pick our way over
sphagnum, bunchberry, and deer ferns through an
understory jungle of red and black huckleberries, orange
squash berries, salal (an evergreen berry bush, once a
staple of the Tsimshian diet), skunk cabbage, and the
menacing devils-club, its stems and huge jungle leaves
fully armed with tiny poison thorns.
Around us the big trees stand sublime: red
cedar, western hemlock, amabilis fir, Sitka spruce. Some
of them better than 200 feet tall and five feet across at
human eye level. Pillars of the community, the huge
Sitkas pump from the soil 400 to 500 gallons of water per
day through transpiration and thus prevent the whole
area from flooding to bog conditions. Water stored in
the soil anchored by their roots provides for constant
flow of the streams necessary for the salmon. The high,
sparse forest canopy allows through sufficient sunlight to
empower the berry bushes. The big spruces and cedars,
when dead, provide elevated den cavities for the
Kermode bears which otherwise risk a rude awakening
from hibernation due to winter rains or snowmelt. A
beautiful system, but delicate. Removal of these giants
would change the ecology of the forest for centuries,
choking out the berry crop and silting out the salmon—
thus starving the bears.
But it is precisely these huge 500-year-old
riverside Sitkas that are lusted over by the big timber
companies, which systematically denude the coastal
streams. Flying northward from Vancouver yesterday we
looked down on monstrous clearcuts, the virgin forest
laid flat, the biggest logs of highest value skidded,
snaked, ballooned and helicoptered off to market. What
do they make out of these logs? Why, the same thing
they make from the last of the old growth timber in
Alaska, Oregon, and anywhere else: dollar bills.
As an antidote to this disease, McCrory and his
colleagues have worked with the First Nations and the
Province to protect a significant portion of the spirit
bear’s habitat here. Yet crucial areas remain licensed to
the clearcutters; they could start anytime.
We step along single-file up a labyrinthian path
created for the most part by the bears themselves. Slick
and treacherous throughout and prone to sudden
disintegration, boot-sucking muck, precarious single-log
bridges, huge banana slugs underfoot, thigh-deep water
crossings, and canes of devil's-club where handholds
seem necessary, and carrying the ever-present possibility
of Grizz, our trail is, by our standards, nearly perfect.
Where the habitat becomes impenetrable for a human
we stagger up the streamside gravel—like walking over a
loose pile of greased bricks—with the sound of an army
on the march. Can't be helped.
Along the stream we find dozens of mangled
salmon carcasses, all the best parts (skin, eggs, loins)
already missing. A bloody, warlike scene, one might
imagine. But actually just the peaceful enactment of an
intersection on the food web. Everyone doing his job.
We observe more scats, this time the color and
consistency of a tarry mousse, the result of a protein
meal. Good and hopeful signs, all.
McCrory explains the rules of the trail. Whisper if
you must talk; the bears like it that way. Piss in the stream
—a difficult proposition which goes against my training.
But human male urine is considered a bear deterrent;
better to flush it away. Stay in groups and let others
know where you'll be. Each group carries a canister of
bear spray, an aerosol concoction containing the active
ingredient of cayenne peppers. Repellent but not
injurious. Use only if absolutely necessary. Is the spirit
bear likely to attack? Not likely at all. But photographers
are renowned for putting bears in compromising
8
situations, and McCrory worries about the bears'
reputation. On the black bears' demeanor, the biologist
quotes an old homesteader's advice: "Twenty-five
percent of them are friendly, thirty-five percent are
unfriendly, and the rest just want to be left alone." How
do you know which is which?
"I watch their eyes," says McCrory.
We pass a young fir with toothmarks around a
scar in the bark. Why would a bear eat the bark of a tree
when it has a year-round supply of its dietary favorites:
skunk cabbage, berries, fat chum salmon? I wondered
that too, says McCrory, until one of the Tsimshian elders
told me that his father chewed the same bark to rid his
intestines of parasite. What kind of parasites? he asked.
The kind you get from eating raw salmon, the old man
said.
We take our stand near a logjam two miles up
the stream. The aroma of dead salmon washes
downstream on the morning breeze. We wait. We wait.
Watching too hard. When we relax they appear, one by
one, usually in perfect silence. As though by magic.
Suddenly we perceive an ursine face among the alders,
studying us. Twice, a bear approaches in open mid
stream before we notice it. One is a large male with a
distinctive injured ear and a rather neutral look on his
face. McCrory recognizes him from years past. Torn Ear
plods by at close range, delighting the camera squad.
In the evening we follow the film team back
downstream. Seven bears today, all of the standard
shade. It is dark when we reach the Zodiac. Our eighth
bear is on the intertidal boulders at the mouth of the
creek. We hear the friction of foot pads on granite, the
sound of breathing. He is black as the night.
Day 3
One of our party, a pale-faced executive type
with the cheapest hip waders I’ve ever seen, is an
interesting character. He marks our trail with eagle
feathers and generously shares his single-malt Scotch.
Good man. Yesterday he told me that the crew’s careless
banter about finding the bears makes him nervous. The
native hunters, he reminded me, never referred to the
bear by name. They called him Grandfather. Treated
with dignity, the spirit of the bear might offer its body to
them. He wonders if we are showing the proper respect.
“You believe those legends?” I asked him,
keeping my own thoughtful questions and questionable
thoughts to myself.
“Metaphors,” he answered.
For our tramp today, I pluck the cross-shaped tip
of a spruce bough and insert it through the buttonhole of
my breast pocket—my boreal boutonniere.
Superstitious? Hell no. Of course not. I just wear it for
good luck. Propitiating the spirits? Only my own.
We pick our way into a different rainforest of
aromatic yellow cedar and lodgepole pine. On the lip of a
steep canyon overlooking a salmon stream we sit down
quietly, waiting for Grandfather. Watching for spirit.
Brother raven drops by to deliver his riddle. Something
about that brazen bird. The Tsimshians saw Raven as
both Creator and Trickster, an intriguing mix, far more
reflective of what I've found in my own reconnoitering
than that God they used to mumble about back in the
Lutheran churches of southern Pennsylvania. Hours pass.
I look down and notice for the first time a retired eagle
feather touching my boot.
From a log bridging the stream and riddled with claw
marks McCrory plucks an ivory hair. The white bear was
here. "I thought so," he says. He probably did. McCrory
operates partly on instinct. For personal safety in bear
country he relies on an undefined sense that tells him
when a bear is near and when he ought to go the other
way. Dependable? So far, he says. Disobeyed it once,
years ago, and got into trouble.
Along with his work on the creeks, McCrory is
investigating native legends for information. All of their
knowledge, he points out, of land, history, and natural
history, is based on a continuous memory across
centuries of observation. There may be a value there that
we do not yet comprehend. He recalls entering grizzly
country with a native who recited a chant at the head of
the trail. "Do you think it worked?" I ask. "I knew it was
serious," he says.
A man of spirit, this McCrory. Of seeing the
white bear, he says, "It strikes chords we didn't know we
had." A sentient biologist. A scientist with one foot
square in his data and the other in the river of feeling.
I respect that, along with a number of his other
traits. That skepticism for dependence on hi-tech
equipment and inferential statistical analyses, for
examples. And his aversion to large bureaucratic fund-
raising organizations. (His Valhalla Society is a grass-roots
network supported by active members.) I admit to him
that I narrowly escaped the environmental bureaucracy
myself. “What happened?” he says. “Burn your necktie?”
“Never owned one,” I tell him. He smiles. Sitting
in the middle of a spirit bear’s bridge above a wild creek
in a mist-veiled forest at the far end of our continent, two
blacksheep biologists strike accord.
No bears volunteer today. But they are here.
Along the trail back I count an average of five steps
between piles of bear shit.
Late that night I climb up on deck alone and
discover an immense curtain of opalescence pulsating
across the sky. Revenge of the cosmic white bear?
9
Supernatural Tsimshian dream net? Not necessarily. Just
a flair of panache in the old chemistry of nature. The
rapture of sun and earth in polar ionic orgasm. Sweet
reality and nothing more. Beyond this veil I see the Great
Bear, Ursa Major, out on her nightly patrol. I look down
and find the entire scene—auroral light, distant stars—
reflected on the water. Then I notice at some level
beneath the surface weird orbs of greenish-blue flaring in
the dark of the sea. Of course: bioluminescent ocean
algae, excited to candescence by the swash of salmon
tails.
I linger here between two infinite realms. I
watch the heavens. I watch the sea. I wonder.
Day 4
Voices drift up from the galley. The two
cinematographers are pointing out how even our
televised “nature” shows distort reality. “Every culture
creates its own mythologies,” says someone. Science can
distort, too, McCrory points out, when it interprets as
conclusive those facts derived from incomplete or
inferential evidence. He argued once with another
biologist (“goddamned technocrat”) who had developed
a statistical interpretation of black bear ecology based on
three years of data from a handful of radio-collared bears.
McCrory suggested to him that an accurate view might
require a bit longer. How much longer? Try thirty or
forty years to start out, he said.
“How the hell can you do that?” cried the
flustered statistician.
“Stay out there and WATCH them,” replied
McCrory, a bit of his Irish showing. Meaning that brief
scientific forays cannot paint the whole picture of reality.
What science gives us at best is a model to aid our
understanding, not unlike the Tsimshian legends which
offered those people scenarios for survival and
celebration in their stirring surroundings.
After breakfast we hike upstream to the logjam
and fall quiet. A gang of ravens cruises in, swearing and
screaming. McCrory swears back at them in their own
language, exacerbating the clamor. Around us the
salmon erupt in bursts of energy, roiling the shallows in
final orgiastic bliss. We wait. Then from the alders the
bear materializes—in black again. Fat and nonchalant,
he swings his head to look at us: unimpressed. Moving
our way, he disappears into a thicket. The photographers
fumble with their film. I sharpen my pencil with a pocket
knife. When our bear reappears he is close. Very close.
He moves toward us through the shallows, belly hairs
dripping, pizzle dangling in the current, aware of our
lurking stares but minding his own business. At a range
of twenty feet he inspects us again through a pair of
brown human eyes close-set on a broad face. A look of—
what?— self-assuredness? concealed disdain?
professional preoccupation? Impossible to assess. But
apparently neither fear nor malice.
Fifteen feet away now, our bear sniffs at the
water's surface, takes an audible breath, and submerges
snout first between logs in the jam. We hear him
snorkling in there. Salmonid shadows dart out from
beneath. He emerges through the same opening with a
three-foot chum contorting in his jaws. Customary
technological scramble. Cameras sing like electronic
cicadas. General jockeying for position, the perfect view,
the ultimate image. The bear looks at us, shakes some
water from his coat (clatter of shutters, whine of
autodrives) and carries his meal into the bush. A wave of
exultation passes among us. Being close to the bear is
still big medicine for the human spirit.
Day 5
We squeak and squash in our sodden boots up a
larger stream and come upon the grandfather of Sitka
spruces: eleven feet across at the level of a human heart.
A tree with dignity, too big to hug. At the base of it a
bear has made his bed. In a sappy scar five feet up a
smaller tree nearby we find white and russet hairs. I glue
them into my notebook with spruce gum.
Day 6
For several hours at midday we drift idly out the
neck of an estuary on a falling tide, soaking ourselves in
the powerful landscape. Shirking our biological duties? I
think not. Floating here in canoes on the face of the sea,
warm sun on our faces, surrounded by a palpable peace
hurried only by the passage of days and the slow
breathing of tides, we acquire—each in his own fashion
—a feel for this place, for the mountains and marshes, the
ravens, the bears, spirits of the land. Must our biological
consideration always circle back to our own lives and
feelings? Yes, I would have to say so. How could we
possibly avoid it? “The true biologist deals with life, with
teeming, boisterous life,” wrote John Steinbeck, “and
learns that the first rule of life is living.”
Day 7
Washing our breakfast dishes on the foredeck,
we watch as Raven patrols her domain. Over the bay she
cries, "Awwk! Awwk!" But upon reaching bear country
she says, "Itguuk. Itguuk. Itguuk." The meanings I don't
comprehend, but I wonder about McCrory. Yesterday I
watched him eye a pair of ravens flying upstream and
when they called from around the bend (Agak! Agak!),
move off in their direction. An hour later he was back,
having stumbled preciously close upon a sow and cub,
which he took me to see.
10
Low on the creek this morning bear tracks cover
yesterday’s boot prints. We come upon old Torn Ear
resting on his elbows, rump high, gnawing on red chunks
of salmon carnage. A pleasing sound, not unlike that of a
child biting into a ripe apple.
In a large pool farther up we find several
hundred fish of at least four different species swimming
slowly in a circle twenty feet across. A delicate, solemn
dance. What would the Tsimshian elders say about this?
What would the fisheries biologists say? I’d rather ask the
elders.
Day 8
I dump Labrador tea, moss, bark, lichen, twigs,
black fly carcasses and trampled huckleberries out of my
boots and follow Wayne up Newt Creek. Fresh signatures
of bear, deer, and wolf in the streamside silt. Wouldn't
mind seeing one of these wolves. According to Wayne
they are lean, long-shanked, and black as the bears. A
more intellectual species however, the wolf eats the
brains of a salmon first.
Sound of wind, taste of untamed huckleberry.
Birches glowing yellow-gold in the September sun. The
river rushes past in one direction, driven by gravity, the
salmon in the other, driven by something else. We watch
a small bear of the prevailing color swipe at a lode of fish
among the boulders. She sees us and retreats to cover.
Three times we hear the crackle of sticks behind us, smell
the odors of bear and the fish on her breath. Hungry but
cautious, she fails to return.
It has just occurred to me that the spiritual
respect McCrory maintains for these bears, the native
legends and his own sensitivities is one ingredient of the
Tsimshian life-models that is absent in our modern
scientific models. And we dearly, desperately need it
back. Not to supplant our scientific biology, but to
complement it, and thereby to reach for the truths which
lie beyond simple fact—and ultimately for a more
complete understanding of life. The greatest cultural
artifact left behind by the Tsimshian elders is their
reminder to respect the white bear and its wild
community as they did. Not through the same
ceremonies, necessarily, but with the same strategy in
mind. They knew all along that their image of the white
bear was actually an image of their own spirit. A
reflection of humanity. Allegory...metaphor...model.
Totem.
Last Day
Last chance. Last chance for what? What is it we're
looking for? Can't say, really. I'm not certain anymore.
We hike to the logjam, a loose confederation of
four of us. We sit and watch. We listen. Time and the
river flow merrily past. The forest broods quietly. Two
bears, standard color, make appearances.
Late in the day we mosey seaward. The camera
people labor alone with their heavy suitcases and tripods,
self-condemned porters of a conventional technology. I
lag behind with my cumbersome thoughts. The current
passes, slow as a dirge, carrying the stiff carcass of a
female chum, belly up, pectoral and caudal fins aslant in
the air like rigid sails. Bound for eternity. I pause here,
waiting for the white bear, a moment of truth, a voice
from the alder bush. Anything will do.
But no epiphanies tonight. Just the quiet beauty
of earth and river and sky, of tall trees and us tender
humans with our tender hopes. The splendor of the hills.
Sweet earthen reality.
My salmon carcass pirouettes slowly, gracefully,
on the braided current. Two dark shadows flap upstream
in the dwindling light, croaking in tongues. Happy in my
search, I stumble down the cobbles toward the ultimate
sea. There is one more bear, in the rocks at the mouth of
the creek. Like the others, he is black as the magic in the
raven’s eye.
And as for the white bear, what is it spirit of?
Why, of itself alone, of its own reality. What else could its
existence out here on the creeks possibly infer, aside from
a healthy, magical habitat? The only ethereal quality of
this creature is its absence from view, its furtive,
clandestine, hypothetical presence. Though I carry
strands of its hair in my tablet, I did not observe the white
bear in corporeal form and therefore it remains a spirit to
me, real but unseen. Not so much an illusion as an
allusion.
Alluding to what? Can this phantom strike those
distant chords in enough of us to inspire the protection of
these woods? Can it stand as symbol of that marriage of
data and legend, of science with feeling, this livelier and
more complete study of life, which may finally allow us to
save our landscapes—and ourselves in the process?
Only if we let it. The mysticism, then and now,
lives wholly in the minds and hearts of humans, ever
struggling to understand our world and our own wild
spirits.
11
Jim Sweeney
Joel’s Ashes
I forgot Joel’s ashes. His wife gave me a small vial and I’ve
been carrying it around in my pocket hoping to feel
better. I wasn’t sure I was going to spread them.
I’m pretty near alone though I’m with fifteen other
writers in a writing workshop in McCarthy, Alaska. I’m on
the moraine at the foot of the Root Glacier lying in a field
of hairy cotton balls that sit on slender stems poking
from a small green leafed plant. The moraine looks like
tailings from a mine that’s been sprinkled with green life.
The glacier down here is black with rock and sand and
stretches for miles into the mountains before it turns
white and disappears into the peaks. In front of me two
ducks draw wakes on a glacial pond. A raven and seagull
loop against a pregnant mountain. The air’s washed clean
and there are not many bugs. Small birds whisper in the
brush and stones tumble down glacier clickity clacking
splashing into the pond. The leaves barely flutter and the
sky’s grey as it has been all summer.
I’m supposed to write an essay about what fascinates me.
We can work on it all week and read it to the group on
our last night.
Joel loved McCarthy. He’d been a glacier guide here and
returned often to climb in Wrangell Mountains. Before my
first trip over here he told me, “The bar’s fun. There’s lots
of girls. Bring your ice tools.” Our friendship wasn’t just
climbing and skiing. I met Joel when Steve Garvey died
rock climbing. He was only thing I inherited from a
twenty-year partnership. Joel worked with me for five
years, and was nineteen years younger than me. We
could climb or build anything.
After a hoot from our instructor I pull myself from the
cotton patch. White fibers stick to my clothes. An eagle
soars between here and an ice fall miles away. Our writing
group gathers on boulders of many colors, size and
shape. We talk about the names and naming of plants,
rocks, and mountains. The names and conversation seem
far away and hollow to me.
Ook ouk ouk a raven cries. An open rib cage of clean ice
floats on another pond. The bottoms of the clouds are
turning white.
Joel didn’t think he would reach thirty. He told his wife, if
he died, he wanted his ashes spread here in McCarthy.
Sometime, after she has the baby we’re going to deal
with that.
Joel died in an avalanche. He made four turns off Ragged
Top above Girdwood. He thought the snow was safe. The
avalanche ripped from a single point, spread out and
dragged him 2,000 feet. He was buried under eight feet
of snow. The experts thought he died quickly.
I pushed Joel to climb and ski. I was hard on him at work.
If I thought, he was rude or unkind, I told him so. We were
different than the other climbers. He didn’t want to die.
He made a mistake. I’ve made hundreds of them. I didn’t
know his wife was pregnant. I found out the night he
died. If I’d known I’d have told him, take it easy.
12
The workshop is good and I like the two instructors, but I
challenge the discussion. Nature writing, sense of place,
political and environmental writing, metaphors and
lessons, give me a break. Please don’t preach to me. Tell
me a story.
What is my problem? Am I sad for Joel, or am I sad for
myself? Was I born sad? Will I feel better when Zoë is
born? Zoë is the Greek word for life. Her birth date is two
days away.
We’re done here on the moraine. I stroll back to the
Wrangell Mountains Center with my old friend Doug. We
leave footprints in the sand winding around the pond.
The clouds are lifting and the sky’s clearing to the west.
The peaks wear fresh snow. I’m asking the name of a tall
white flower. Two yellow leaves mark the path back.
Sandra Kleven
Jaden Is Calling
I was thinking of writing. I had this idea that the
right words would help. I wanted to write a prescription,
a cure. I was thinking about his teachers. I wanted to tell
them all about Jaden because they might get interested,
then they might try a little harder and, maybe, they
would find the key. They might start to believe there was
a key.
I am afraid they see him without history. They
do not know that his mother had two miscarriages
before she carried him to near term; how she went into
early labor on Christmas Eve, just as we started to open
presents; how earlier that evening, the children’s choir
had been singing, “For onto us a child is born, onto us a
son is given;” and how in that Christmas emergency, it
was so fitting that the father was Joseph and the mother
Lena Marie, and how, onto them, the baby, Jaden, was
born on December 27th and how we celebrated a late
family Christmas in the hallway at Providence Hospital.
Jaden was the fulfillment of years of wanting
and shoring up under disappointment. The teachers
don’t know that his mother took him to Sears for a formal
photograph at one month, two, three, and on, for a
whole year, or how Lena picked names for her children,
when she was a child and never changed her mind about
them. Names for two boys, Jaden and Joren.
Jaden is Rueben’s fair Christ child, his eyes limpid
blue pools. You can read wonder in his eyes but you do
not see the snap of comprehension. Something happens
in his brain that has left him forever in the moment.
Things don’t add up. Jaden turned six last December, but
he does not use a spoon. He wears diapers. He kisses
with his mouth open, like a baby bird. Sometimes his
mom tries to get him to say, More or Eat, before she
hands him something he wants. He seems to try – a little
sound will slip out -- but it bothers him to be pushed like
that. It makes him feel inadequate. I can see it.
Because it’s like he is almost here. Sometimes it
seems very close, as if he were merely askew, at a slight
angle to all of us. In the angled place, he is perfect. If we
could just step a precise fraction to the left or to the right,
we’d face him directly and his eyes would light up with
recognition and perception. But it has to be the right
move, because he might be fragile along that line. If we
showed up there abruptly -- if he suddenly saw us in a
new way -- it could be too much for him and he would go
forever to the other place.
I would tell his teachers that he had been
progressing nicely until it started, that he could sing Old
McDonald and was counting -- one through ten. He
loved the brown bear book and Baby Einstein. His mom
called him escape artist after the way he could exit his
crib, and climb into their bed. One day, he told her, “I
love you.”
Then he went backward. He lost milestones. He
lost words. He lost interest. He lost his overt connection
to us. I denied it. I didn’t want to believe it. I had never
13
heard of children going backwards. Some milestones he
never met. He never did point. He never waved bye-bye.
When it started, his mom told me “His eyes are
rolling back in his head.” My mind said, “No.” My mind
said “That doesn’t sound good.” What did it mean? No
answers were quick in coming. The answers took years.
And they were inadequate.
They tried every medicine. They placed an
implant in his chest – a vagal nerve stimulator. Its round
hockey puck contours can be seen just below his collar
bone. Every new option brought a little hope, followed
by waiting, followed by a search for another option.
Jaden walks well. He runs confidently. He can
climb stairs and he knows how to pull down the oven
door to use it as a step so he can climb up onto the
counter. We praise him for it -- eager for signs of thought
and reasoning.
Sometimes, when Jaden is on his tummy, either
in bed or resting on the couch, he begins to thrust his
hips, clearly sexual. He groans in response to feelings in
his body. His dad says, “Jaden, knock it off.” It alarms me
to think of this happening in school. “Never mind him,
children. Just look away.”
Jaden’s parents care for him as if he were an
enchanted prince. His grandfather thinks he is going to
snap out of it. It may seem extreme or desperate but
whenever someone dies, I pray they will help from the
other side.
Last year, for no reason, Jaden started standing
on his head. In an odd coincidence, the same day, his
uncle, Michael, who was about forty, was also standing
on his head -- Yoga -- even though they were in different
locations, one not an influence on the other. The form
was similar, though, Michael balanced using his angled
arms for support and Jaden balanced on the crown of his
head leaning against a wall or window with his arms
extended like a man on a cross.
I Googled disability, head stands, seizures, parent
groups, standing on head. Nothing came up. I was looking
for some kind of key, something that would link this
behavior with a point of entry to his mental processes.
There are clues: He called his own house last
week from the extension upstairs. Maybe it was random,
who knows? It reminded me of another time when he
dialed 911. We discovered this when a dispatcher called
back to see if there was an emergency. Then, there was
the spat of head standing. No explanation. He is not one
for explaining. I want to know where Jaden went and
when he is coming back.
Do you call this a tragedy? Do you call it the
diversity of God’s creation? Do you rejoice and be glad in
it? Jaden laughs all the time. He’s like a muse, like Pan, or
a laughing God – mirth is in him. We are glad in this.
So I thought, if I could just tell the teachers all
this, they’d get an idea of what they are dealing with and
their approach would be on target. If they knew about
him, they would see that they are approaching a miracle
and all they have to do is pay attention. If we are not
watching, a window might close. I want them to know
that the prayers to my dead relatives have helped,
because it seems the seizures have stopped. Maybe he
will move through all the developmental stages and get
back the lost milestones. But someone has to be
watching -- like they do with the SETI – with all those
computers? If we see a sign, we have to recognize it and
reinforce it, as if he were sending a signal. We have to
make the link. It is very important. It’s like he’s been
trying to call.
14
Russ Van Paepeghem
Neighbors
It was raining in Fairbanks when Erin and I drove home.
We talked about the weather a bit, how it had affected
her running of the marathon that day. Trash was on the
pavement – paper cups and plastic numbers and junk
from the backs of pickups that go too fast and care too
little about what they’re absenting behind them.
Something about the rain and the rolled-up windows of
the car and detritus of the marathon on the road we
drove made us feel as though we were the only ones in
the world at that moment.
When we turned the corner into our dirt lane,
the cruisers of two Alaska State troopers were parked in
evident places, lights off, engines too. Our neighbor,
Gary, and his wife were standing outside of their cabin in
the rain. One trooper in short sleeves spoke with them,
looked at me oddly when I waved. As if I were a
nuisance. Gary’s hat was on crooked, I remember, like
he’d just thrown it on. It looked very different from the
trooper’s hat, all round and wool and sucked to his head.
Slow, we drove on toward our place.
The second trooper was parked in Bob’s
driveway, beside old power tools and truck tires
scattered in his front lot. Lights were on in the house.
Day was just retreating to dusk, and so it made
those lights look like dim candles. I remembered that
those lights were on the other morning – two mornings
ago – when I walked down to get the paper from the red
box at the end of the dirt lane. His lights were almost
never on.
We drove on.
The next cabin’s driveway, the one I’d help build for my
landlord two summers earlier, just had the square blue
Subaru of our new neighbors in it. The original cabin had
burned down in the middle of winter a year and a half
prior – in February and its forty below – and the fire
trucks were there for eight hours because the water kept
freezing as they pumped it on. By the end, it
was one pile of long-dead fire and rotten ice. We still
hadn’t met the newest neighbors to live there. They’d
just moved in a few days ago.
Then there was Chris, our closest neighbor, with
his wife, standing out in the rain talking closely with
another couple, one of whom looked like neighbor Bob:
he had the gray hair of Bob, his pot-belly, jeans and white
tennis shoes. He was too far away to see his leather skin,
though; Bob had leather skin, wrinkled like goatskin
gloves that you find at the hardware store. We waved
and pulled into our place. Unloaded the car. Chris’ wife
left while we did.
“I’m gonna go visit with Chris,” I told Erin. Even
though we’d lived there two years, Chris and I talked
little. He was a union carpenter, gone always, worked
from sunup to sundown. His wife rarely came out of the
house. One of the few times we spoke directly was when
a cow moose bedded down in his son’s jungle gym and
died. Then, friends were helping him load the carcass
onto the bed of a low trailer. It’s not what it looks like, he
said. We didn’t poach her. I believed him, and they
hauled away the big brown body to the dump, since Fish
and Game would allow no one to claim the rotten meat.
Another time I helped him move a refrigerator
he was trying to wrestle by himself down the steps of his
cabin. We took the old one off the porch and put it in his
truck and moved the new one already offloaded up to the
top of the stairs. We lifted it up and over the threshold of
his home, and then from inside his home he said thanks.
And so when he stood outside in the rain that
day, as though he were taking numbers, it was an
opportunity I felt obliged to take. Sometimes we do
things despite knowledge of their impact or how they
might make us feel. We do them because we feel it’s just
the thing to do.
When they saw me coming, the older couple
moved to their car: wasn’t Bob at all.
Chris acknowledged me with a flip of his chin.
-Hey.
He stood, grizzled face, flannel shirt. I remember
15
thinking that he looked a lot like me.
-What’s up?
He paused. Looking at the car.
It turned in its own tracks, and then it drove
away up the potholed lane.
-Bob’s dead, he said. Plainspoken. It felt as
thought he would not look at me.
-Really. I crossed my arms, felt the rain bear
down. When it rains in Fairbanks, it doesn’t rain hard,
just steady.
-Yeah, I found him a couple hours ago with puke
and blood all over his face.
He waited.
I think it was a couple of days ago, man. I think
he died and no one knew.
Finally he looked at me. The hard grizzle on his
face contrasted with the soft flannel of his shirt and made
me believe he was tougher than what he appeared.
Meanwhile, the rain collected in potholes that hadn’t
been razed since we’d first moved in. I wondered if that
was our responsibility.
-I just saw him and freaked, man, he said.
-You all right?
-Yeah, like I said, I just freaked and ran back here.
I called my wife. I called 911.
He was animating his movements with long
sweeps of his arms, back and forth across the driveway.
These movements showed me both the fever and pitch
of how he moved.
-They wanted me to touch him. Touch him,
man. He was all bloated. I was like, he’s dead, man,
there’s no way I’m touching him. She says: I really need
you to touch him for me. So I touched him.
His arms were folded like mine, under the
clothing.
-Bob was a good friend, man, he said.
We talked and stood for a few minutes until we
saw the troopers leave. We just talked and stared down
the lane the way brothers do when they have little to say,
usually in spite of the need to say much.
-I’d better let you get out of the rain, he said,
turned. The back of soft flannel then facing me in the
drive.
-Yeah, I said, and did what he allowed me to do.
Bill Sherwonit
On an Early
Winter Day, an
Abundance of
Bugs
The sky is dark and heavy with dull, leaden
clouds. The forest, now stripped bare of leaves, drips with
somber wetness. Skeletal birch and cottonwoods rise
above soft ground whitened by slushy snow. In short, it’s
the sort of early winter day that’s all too common in
Anchorage, a day that many people lament for its
dreariness and will soon forget as it blends with others of
its kind.
I, too, often feel my spirits droop beneath the
weight of such dark weather and a sodden landscape. But
today my mood brightens the farther I walk along the
Coastal Trail with Coya, my mixed collie. This hike, this
day, are made memorable by the critters we encounter
16
along the way, unexpected meetings that lift the spirits
while engaging the senses.
Two cow-calf pairs get our attention, both
feeding within a short stone’s throw of the trail. And a
high-pitched tsssssst amid a stand of birches leads to the
uncommon sighting of a brown creeper, a year-round
resident of the Anchorage Bowl, but an LBB (little brown
bird, for those not into birding lingo) not often seen, in
my experience. Both moose and bird will be worth a
mention in my field journal. But what really sets the day
apart from most others is the abundance of bugs – a
term I use loosely here, to include both insects and
spiders – that are crawling across the snow and
occasionally flying above it. I can’t recall exactly when I
began to pay attention to such things. But for many years
now, I’ve made it a habit, during Anchorage’s transitional
seasons, to look for bugs that somehow manage to walk
or fly about in conditions you’d expect would kill them –
or at least numb them into inactivity
Cold-blooded invertebrates aren’t expected to
be active when snow covers the ground and
temperatures drop toward the freezing point. Yet often
they are; at least a hardy few. One recent year I recorded
the outdoor presence of Anchorage insects in every
winter month. Yes, it was an unusually mild winter,
marked by periodic thaws. Still, who’d have guessed? Not
me, certainly. Maybe an entomologist.
There’s one type of spider that I’ve taken to
calling the “snow spider,” because it’s the one arachnid
(not to be confused with insects, of course) that I’ve
found crawling across the snow in both early and late
winter and, more rarely, in the depths of the season.
Small enough to comfortably perch on the tip of
my pinky, these spiders generally have dark brown
abdomens and lighter chestnut-brown legs. They’re out
and about today, as I’d guessed they might be, crawling
slowly across the slush and instinctively curling up if I get
too close.
Sometimes my meddling self can’t resist moving
spiders and other bugs from trails, fearing they might get
squashed by less attentive walkers or skiers. I’ve largely
stopped doing that after crippling a few in my awkward
rescue attempts and today I leave the spiders entirely
alone, partly because human traffic is so sparse.
But spiders are neither the most abundant nor
the most obvious invertebrate on the prowl today. That
would be Elasmostethus interstinctus, the birch shield
bug, an insect I’ve come to know better thanks to
Dominique M. Collet’s Insects of South-central Alaska,
the first layperson field guide to our region’s common
insects.
I’ve longed many years for a decent guide to
Alaska’s insects, so I was delighted to discover Collet’s
book while browsing the aisles of Title Wave Books last
spring. For all my good intentions, I barely opened Insects
this past summer, while busy with grander interests and
adventures. But the book’s been getting more use with
the cooling days and shortening hours of daylight. I fully
expect it to become an integral part of my day pack once
next year’s bug season kicks into full gear, because I’m
constantly finding creeping, crawling, buzzing bugs that
I’d love to know better, maybe even on a common-name
basis.
As its name suggests, the body of E. interstinctus
closely resembles a miniature shield. Crudely triangular in
shape and, by Collet’s measure, about three-eighths of an
inch long, adult shield bugs are mostly olive green, with a
reddish zigzag pattern atop their backs. But today they
simply appear dark and bulky (by insect standards)
against the bright snow.
Once upon a time – well, not so long ago,
actually, but at least a year or two before I found Collet’s
Alaska-specific guide – I confused shield bugs with stink
bugs, another, much larger family of common insects.
And to be honest, I’m still not sure they’re so different
from each other. My Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of
North America – another recent acquisition – notes that
“shield-backed bugs are often lumped with stink bugs
but are recognized by the enlarged scutellum [the platy
shield that covers its body].”
Since they gained my attention several years
ago, I’ve handled my share of local shield bugs,
sometimes to brush them off my clothes and other times
because I’m curious. And I have to say, they can give off
an awfully repugnant odor.
Collet doesn’t mention anything about repellent
smells, but either shield bugs can stink things up or
Anchorage has stink bugs, despite their absence in his
Southcentral guide. (It’s worth noting that both shield
and stink bugs are what entomologists call “true bugs.”
17
Unlike other insects that we lay folks indiscriminately call
bugs, these, among other things, are characterized by
mouth parts that according to Collet, “are modified into a
piercing-sucking stylet.”)
Today I’m mostly content to keep a respectful
distance, though I can’t resist stooping in now and again
for a closer look or even a touch. At first glance and from
afar, the shield bugs appear frozen in place. But when I
stop for a longer, closer gaze, or nudge their hard-shelled
forms, I notice the legs move ever so slightly. It makes
sense that they’re moving somewhere, albeit at a snail’s
pace. Or slower. Why else would they be out in such
weather?
For a while I keep track of their numbers,
figuring I might see a handful, maybe even a dozen if I’m
lucky. But it quickly becomes apparent that they’re
everywhere along this stretch of trail, so I give up that
effort. I don’t go more than a few steps without passing
another of their dark, stout bodies and must see scores of
them during my 3-mile walk.
Never have I noticed so many shield bugs. And
to see them on snow is especially rare. In fact I have a
hard time recalling more than a few crossing snowy
ground. Across the years, I’ve mostly observed them in
late summer and into the fall. That jives with Collet’s
comment that “This brightly colored insect is often
noticed in the fall when they start entering houses in
search of overwintering sites.”
His observation helps to explain their abundance
here today. These shield bugs must have been surprised
by Anchorage’s mid-October snows and below-average
cold. Now they’re in something of a last-ditch search for a
place to spend the next several months. I almost said
“desperate” search, but I’m not sure shield bugs ever feel
desperation.
Besides snow spiders and shield bugs, I see
midges slowly whirring through the air. They seem so
dainty, but midges must be among the tougher flying
insects, because they’re also among the few species to
appear late into the fall and early in the spring – and
sometimes, during warm spells, in winter itself.
About a mile into our walk, along one short
stretch of trail, I encounter the most amazing spectacle of
all: several small, black flies are whirling and flopping
upon the snow. Actually, I’m not entirely sure they’re flies;
but I can’t find anything in Collet’s guidebook that
definitively matches their size and appearance, so for
simplicity’s sake I stick them in the order Diptera, which
includes everything from mosquitoes to gnats, midges,
crane flies, whitesox, no-see-ums, and house flies.
The flies’ frenzied manner is especially curious on
a day when their invertebrate relatives are moving ever
so slowly and it stirs vague and distant memories of other
insects that whirled crazily after their flying ability (if I
remember correctly) had been compromised or damaged
in some way, either chemically or physically.
On a hunch, I pick one up and place it on my
open palm. It’s small, about the size of a sesame seed or
even smaller, and appears black in color, with wings
folded over its back.
The fly sits quietly a moment or two, then shifts
its body upon the cooled but relatively warm surface of
my hand. Then, almost before you could say “there it
goes,” the reinvigorated fly flies off. This suggests that the
cold has inhibited the ability of these whirling, flopping
bugs to stay (or get) airborne. They’re trying to lift off the
snow, but can’t. Maybe earlier in the afternoon it was just
warm enough that they could zoom here and there. If I
had the patience and time to stay and watch, I bet they’d
eventually stop their whirling-dervish ways and enter a
kind of stupor.
There’s no question that the presence of moose
and squirrel, brown creeper and chickadee, redpoll and
magpie, have enlivened my walk, my day. But it’s also
clear that what makes this afternoon hike especially
memorable are the much tinier, easy-to-overlook bugs
that inhabit this forest and other woodlands (and
18
habitats) across the city. That they are creeping and
crawling, whirring and whirling on this cold and raw early
winter day is another one of those “small” miracles that
open up my life.
I’ve often thought it would be both fun and
informative to begin building a life list of the insects and
arachnids with which we share the Anchorage Bowl, a
sort of invertebrate equivalent to what birders do. One
thing that has stopped me is my aversion to collecting
specimens, which would aid the identification process.
As a boy I killed more than my share of “creepy crawly”
life forms. I have no desire to kill more, simply to learn
about and catalogue my tiny, wild neighbors.
I’ve also been slowed by a lack of resources
(whether perceived or real). Now that I have Collet’s
guide – supplemented by the Kaufman book – I can
more easily move ahead and at least begin to expand my
knowledge of local bugs, without having to collect them
for later reference. Maybe this will also motivate me to
seek out local entomologists for their expertise.
Guidance is a good thing.
Heading back to Point Woronzof, I’m alreadyrolling around many questions I might ask after sharing
today’s dark and snowy day with an abundance of bugs.
Steve Taylor
Ptarmigan Huntingin Alaska: A LoveStory
I was happy. I really was. I was single and doing
what I loved in the great outdoors. I had a small acreage
and a yellow dog. I had plenty of money and free time.
Picture a fair-haired lad standing tall on the summit of
life- living every man’s dream in the middle of California.
I had plenty of girlfriends but wasn’t a lady’s
man, not a pretty boy. You’d find me on the ice playing
hockey or stomping around the hills chasing mountain
quail before you’d get me out club-hopping. I had
successfully avoided marriage for 33 years by sabotaging
every loving relationship by simply not taking it
seriously. I wanted women, but didn’t need them. All I
really needed was my Labrador Retriever, a shotgun, and
fields to wander. Some women would hang in there for
years, waiting for me to grow out of my meandering.
Then they’d they’d start pushing. Then they were gone.
There was no thunderbolt strike when I met the
Woman. My knees didn’t get weak when I saw her. Insert
your own cliché- it wasn’t us. I was a bird-hunting guide,
she was a bunny-hugging vegetarian. She was a
Democrat who idolized Hillary and I was so far Right I
thought Rush was a little pink. It was still the smoothest
relationship I’d known. Sure, we argued, but even that
was refreshing. Here was a woman who didn’t stoop to
agree with me. She knew her mind and could state it
without getting cruel or
emotional. Slowly, without really being conscious of it, I
came to love and yes, to need her. I became tender, nay,
affectionate for the first time. The Woman didn’t push,
she pulled. This was possible because she loved me. But
she didn’t need me. She accepted my bird hunting
business because...you can’t get too emotional about a
bird. “It’s not like killing Bambi or something cute,” she’d
tell her friends, “It’s just a bird.” She loved the outdoors
and would joyfully tromp a few steps apace of me and
the dog, pointing out pretty wildflowers or asking
questions about animal tracks. I was careful to only take
her places where the chances of seeing a pheasant or
grouse were dubious. I didn’t want to scare her off
hunting or think it was some kind of slaughter. So I took
her to marginal territory here in the Central Valley where
we had a fine time afield without being interrupted by
actually killing anything. I didn’t expect to convert her-
no chance of that- but I wanted her to understand. To
know that I didn’t hold myself above the circle of life, that
I wanted to join in it.
I had hunted critters all over the country for
sport and profit, but one game bird always intrigued me:
the ptarmigan of Alaska. It was about twice as big as a
pigeon and lived on the flat, intimidating tundra. There
are three subspecies of the ptarmigan, pronounced
without the “p”: the Rock, White-Tailed, and Willow.
Alaska was supposed to be full of them. I invited the
Woman but warned her- this is a real Hunting Trip. The
sixth Commandment would be broken. Repeatedly, if
possible. We’d fly into Fairbanks then rent an RV and
strike out into the wilderness. No map, no idea where I
might find ptarmigan. But the dog and I were
professionals. It would be a bloodbath.
The plan was bold and exciting and worked.
Except for the killing part. We walked and drove and
walked some more but didn’t find a single bird. Three
days of hiking in the Alaskan outback held no joy for me.
The spongy peat of the tundra is like walking on a
waterbed. It’s strange and exhilarating for about ten
19
minutes then turns into a thigh-burning nightmare.
Especially with no birds to shoot.
The Woman, of course, loved it. We saw caribou,
moose, grizzly-tracks and a wolf. The autumn hues of the
pygmy willows and low berry shrubs were impossible
greens and yellows and a thousand variations of the
color red. The Woman adored them all and made the
dog and I pause several times each hour to look at a
particularly artful arrangement of blossoms or to identify
animal droppings. The hiking? “What a great workout!”,
she squealed, “I’ll go back a changed woman!” I could
hear her humming contentedly at my side as we slogged
through the endless morass of the fruitless plain.
On an unremarkable ledge on yet another
pointless walk, I just gave up. I sat down on the cold wet
ground. I was beaten. I put up a good fight, but my prey
had won fair and square. “There’s four birds right there!”,
the Woman shouted, pointing off to the side of the game
trail we had been following. These birds had never seen
humans before and acted like it. The dog and I walked
within about ten feet of the crane-necked rock
ptarmigan before they finally got nervous and took off.
Two birds fell with the first shot and I let out a “Whoop!!”
of victory. The surviving pair lit about 20 yards away and
waited there patiently for the dog to retrieve their
downed comrades. Then he and I marched over and
flushed them, and I shot both.
I held up one of the majestic birds to admire.
Brilliant white wing-tips and a body flecked with grey-
black feathers. Beautiful. I turned to find the Woman
sobbing, standing fixed in the spot only yards away
where she had pointed the birds for me. Damn. I went
to her and said weakly, “Everything’s got to die, baby.”
but she was shaking and looked away. I should have said
something eloquent, something compelling like, “Life on
earth is not like a ladder, with humans at the top and all
the other beasts scrambling beneath. We are just
animals with forethought. I kill with a responsibility.”
Instead, I tucked the ptarmigan into my game pouch and
we walked back to the motor home in the rain.
Back at the RV, the Woman was quiet and made
herself busy cleaning and straightening up. I moved
behind her as she stood at the sink, and she slumped
into my arms. She wasn’t crying but she was troubled. In
a rare flash of wisdom, I kept my mouth shut and waited
for her. “I know you love hunting, honey, and I do want
you to be happy. I know you won’t change, and that’s
really OK. But I’m not going to change either, so we’re
stuck, here.” I held her for a long time, just feeling her
close and thinking hard.
Then I showered and shaved for the first time all
week. I put on the only clean clothes left, the jeans and
sweatshirt reserved for the plane ride back, and dug into
the backpack. I’d been carrying the ring around for a
month, cracking the box open, breathing deeply, then
quickly stuffing it out of sight. Waiting for The Time. It
was a full carat and represented more than a few month’s
work of leading hunters to murder birds.
I called her outside. “Now?”, she asked, “What’s
going on?”. I just stood there on the sweeping plateau
looking back at her. She sighed and walked out. It had
just snowed and was very cold. We squeezed together
for warmth. The highest mountain on the continent was
looking down on us in white majesty. The Woman took it
all in then looked to me for explanation. I whispered in
her ear, “Thank you for coming out here. Thank you for
trusting me.”
There, 20 miles down a dirt road with no name in
the middle of the tundra, I fell to one knee in the mud.
She looked down into my face for a moment, missing the
ring I was thrusting near her chin. She seemed puzzled
for a moment then saw it. Her hand flew to her mouth
and she called to God.
The rest is too precious. It is forever in my mind,
one of those flashbulb-memories that I can’t even think of
now without getting unmanly and emotional. The point
is, she said yes.
But she was wrong- I did change. After we were
married I quit guiding hunters and went back to school. I
got my Masters and now I spend my time in group homes
counseling kids with real problems. I still hunt and spend
twice as much time in the woods as in my bachelor years.
But now she and I build nesting boxes for wood ducks,
cut brush piles for quail cover, and dig tanks for water
sources. I produce twice as many birds as I harvest each
year.
She says that’s OK.
20
Plays
Nancy Lord
At Sea
“At Sea” was presented in the Play Lab at the Last Frontier (Valdez) Theatre Conference in 2005 and given a staged
performance by the T.B.A. acting company at the conference in 2006 in a showcase of Alaskan plays. It also was presented in
a staged reading at Seaside (FL) Repertory Theatre in 2008.
SYNOPSIS: Brothers-in-law in a drifting boat test their relationship and survivorship skills.
CHARACTERS
OWEN: a man about thirty, dressed in new (still creased) and stylish outdoor gear, a New York Yankees ballcap, and a
bulky orange Mae West life jacket. Fancy video camera and binoculars around his neck.
GEORGE: a man closer to forty, dressed in Carharts, grungy jacket, and a faded ballcap with some company logo.
SETTING
At rise, the two men are adrift in a wooden skiff. GEORGE, in stern, is leaning over the outboard, from which he’s
removed the hood. OWEN sits in the bow, facing the stern.
OWEN: You know, those guys on the Essex, they drifted around in their little whaleboat for--I don’t know--I forget how
long. Long enough to eat one another.
GEORGE: (Looking up.) And your point is?
OWEN: Just making conversation. (He stares out toward the horizon.)
(GEORGE mutters something unintelligible.)
OWEN: It could be worse, that’s all I meant.
21
GEORGE: It could be better if you hadn’t dropped the spark plug overboard.
OWEN: You know I’m not seaworthy. You shouldn’t have let me hold it.
GEORGE: I thought wiping it off on your shirttail wouldn’t be that challenging.
OWEN: I’m easily challenged. (Pause.) The thing that gets me is that you’d go out here (gestures widely with his arms)
without spare parts. And a radio. Emergency stuff. You know, you being the brother-in-law and all, the responsible
one, the one guy my sister actually likes.
GEORGE: There was a reason.
OWEN: Oh?
GEORGE: I was rushing.
OWEN: I wasn’t rushing you.
GEORGE: Your sister was. She said, quote, get him out of here. He wants to see whales. Show him some whales.
OWEN: I’m looking. (He makes an exaggerated show of peering out at the water.) (Pause.) She said that?
(GEORGE puts the hood back on the motor and sits beside it, so the two men, at opposite ends, are facing one another.)
GEORGE: She thinks you’re still ten years old.
OWEN: No. (Pause.) She thinks I’m fourteen. She thinks I’m going to snap her bra strap or something. Like she never
forgave me for the time I told on her making out in the garden shed.
GEORGE (Ignoring Owen, looks around, with a mildly worried look.) It’s pretty lonely out here on a weekday.
Eventually, though, someone’s bound to spot us. (Pause.) Of course, the tide’s pulling us out. Once we’re in the gulf . . .
OWEN: (After a moment.) Actually, I think I was about eleven that time. I didn’t like her boyfriend. He was mean to me.
When I was fourteen, I think I was making out in the garden shed. Sheila O’Reilly—boy, I haven’t thought about her in a
long time.
GEORGE: (Still looking toward gulf.) It’s a big ocean out there. If we drift into the shipping lane, I guess a tanker or
cargo ship might see us. Or might not. It might run right over us. The seas can get pretty wild out there, too.
OWEN: You don’t want to hear about our family. You don’t want to know about old Andy.
GEORGE: Who’s old Andy?
OWEN: Judith’s ninth-grade boyfriend.
GEORGE: You’re right about that. And you can pretend we’re not really drifting out into the North Pacific Ocean.
Where would you like to be? Lake Wonkamoopoo? Where was that place your family used to go in the summer, where
you were always falling off the dock?
OWEN: Once I fell off the dock. Lake Winnepasakee. In New Hampshire.
GEORGE: Fine.
22
(OWEN opens a small picnic cooler and looks inside.) Now I wish we hadn’t eaten those sandwiches already.
GEORGE: You’ll die of thirst before you’ll die of hunger.
OWEN: (Contemplates this.) Well, I know you don’t ever want to drink salt water, although apparently you can drink
urine. But rain’s the thing. (Looks up.) You’d want to capture as much rain as you could. Those guys from the Essex,
after they got rammed by that Moby-Dick whale, survived for a long time on rain and each other.
GEORGE: Fascinating.
OWEN: It is! It’s an amazing true story. Think about it! A bunch of guys in a little whaleboat, not knowing if they’ll ever
see land again, and they have to figure how to create a civil society in the space of 25 feet, one that will give them their
best chance of survival. (He looks along the length of the boat.) How long’s this boat?
GEORGE: Eighteen feet (or whatever actual boat on set is). Let’s hear it for cannibalism.
OWEN: That was later. At first they organized themselves, like taking turns lying down or bailing water. It was damn
crowded. Then the weakest ones died. The first one or two, they did the civilized thing--they dropped them over the
side. But then they realized that that wasn’t the best survival technique for the rest of them, so they got over that
particular hang-up, the idea that you couldn’t eat another person, who was already dead anyway.
GEORGE: I guess you had to be there.
OWEN: If I was dead, I wouldn’t care if you ate me. If it would help you live.
GEORGE: Thanks.
OWEN (Waits.) You’d do the same for me. (Pause.) Wouldn’t you?
GEORGE: I don’t think I’d have much choice. I’d be dead.
OWEN: But you wouldn’t mind? I mean, before you were dead, you’d say something, you’d give me permission?
GEORGE: I’d be in a coma.
OWEN: Before that.
GEORGE: I’d be hallucinating. I’d be attacking you with a knife.
OWEN: (Startled.) You would?
GEORGE: Hell, Owen, I don’t know. Why are you talking about this shit?
OWEN (Watches the water, several beats.) Think we’ll see any whales?
GEORGE: (More kindly.) I’m doing my best tour guide impersonation. I’ve been watching for blows. A day like this,
they shouldn’t be hard to see, even a long way off.
OWEN (Fiddles with his video camera, looking through it, pointing it at the horizon. He points it back at GEORGE and
starts filming, dum-dumming the theme to “Jaws.”)
GEORGE: Cut it out. (He frowns at the camera.)
23
OWEN (Narrating) And this is my brother-in-law, who took me whale-watching. (Turns camera back to water.) This is
the ocean, where the whales live. They’re there somewhere, in the deep blue sea. What kind, again, George?
GEORGE: (Irritated.) Humpbacks. Killer whales, if you’re lucky.
OWEN: I want to be lucky and see killer whales. I want to yell, “Thar she blows!” (He turns the camera off.)
(They both stare at the water, in different directions, for a minute.)
OWEN: Judith really said that?
GEORGE: What?
OWEN: Get him out of here?
GEORGE: Well, something like that. She had her hands full, with the kids and all. She wanted you to have a good time.
OWEN: (Thinks about this. He takes his cap off and runs his hand through his hair.) Yeah, well, after a while on that
whaleboat, they decided it wasn’t all that smart to wait for people to die. By the time they died, there was hardly
anything left worth eating--I mean no fat at all--plus, at that point, it looked like they were all going to starve.
GEORGE: (Points.) There’s some birds feeding over there. Must be a school of herring or something right there.
OWEN: They drew lots. It was fair that way.
GEORGE: Sometimes humpbacks will come up under a school like that, they’ll just explode through the surface with
their mouths wide open.
OWEN: (After a moment.) You think I’m not listening. I’ve got a picture in my mind of a humpbacked humpback.
GEORGE: Good.
OWEN: What about the other ones?
GEORGE: Killer whales?
OWEN: Tell me they’re not particularly killers.
GEORGE: Oh, but they are. They’re the wolves of the sea. They’ll attack bigger whales sometimes. Watch for really tall
dorsal fins.
(OWEN looks worried.)
GEORGE: You can call them orcas. (Pause.) The other whale it’s possible we could see out here--sometimes, far
enough out, in the gulf, in really deep water—is a sperm whale.
OWEN: You’re kidding.
GEORGE: I’m not kidding. Why would I be kidding? There are sperm whales in the gulf. I’ve seen them. They kind of
just rest there at the surface sometimes. Sometimes they hang out around fishing boats and eat the black cod off their
hooks.
24
OWEN: Moby Dick was a sperm whale. I know all about Moby Dick.
GEORGE: I thought you did.
OWEN: Sperm whales have nothing to do with sperm. Spermacetti, that weird stuff the whalers wanted, they thought
it looked like the other thing. (Looks with binoculars, slowly scanning, then drops them to his chest.) The real Moby
Dick attacked and crushed the real whaling ship.
GEORGE: That must have been one pissed-off whale.
OWEN: Oh, man. (Thinking.) Just so you know, the guys in the little whaleboat finally did get rescued. Or two of them
did, the two that were still alive, sitting there with a pile of bones they didn’t want to leave. They were cracking the
bones open and sucking every bit of marrow out of them. They had to be physically separated from the bones. Even
then, once they were taken aboard the ship that found them, their pockets were filled with finger and toe bones. They
were, like, completely insane.
GEORGE: (Stares at OWEN.) When we don’t come home, they’ll send a plane out to look for us. And then a Coast Guard
boat, or the auxillary. If I die, it’s going to be from embarrassment about having to be rescued. (Pause.) But I’m still
hoping some other boat will show up and give us a spark plug or a tow. That’ll be embarrassing enough.
OWEN: (Smiles.) Did you think I was worried? I wasn’t really worried. I was just thinking about--you know--being crazy
as a survival mechanism. Going insane was the only way those guys could reconcile themselves to killing and eating
their buds and having nothing to live for except sucking on bones. That, and hope.
GEORGE: (Giving in.) So, did they stay crazy? Or did they get better after they were rescued?
(OWEN messes with the cooler, swinging the lid open and closed with nervous energy.) I don’t remember that part. I
think they got better.
GEORGE: Let me have one of those Sprites.
OWEN: (Stops fiddling, hesitates.) I don’t know. We might need them.
GEORGE: Owen!
OWEN: What?
GEORGE: Give me one of those cans.
(OWEN tosses a can down the boat-length, to him.) Aye, aye, captain.
(GEORGE pops top and drinks.)
OWEN: (Makes a 360-degree turn, looking for whales.) Yeah, I think that Judith just really was in a hurry for me to see
whales. She knows how much I’ve wanted to.
GEORGE: (Takes off his jacket.) It’s getting hot.
OWEN: You think?
GEORGE: Hot for Alaska. But there’ll be a daybreeze coming up. You can take off that jacket. I don’t think you’re going
to fall overboard. Though I guess you could. If anyone could.
25
OWEN: I meant . . . Nevermind. (Owen decides he is too hot, takes off all equipment, takes off the life jacket, puts gear
back on. He puts his hand in a pocket, pulls out a handful of Tootsie-Roll candies.) Oh my god! Tootsie Rolls! Who
named them that!? Tootsie Rolls!
GEORGE (Holds out his hand.) Sure, I’ll have one. Thank you.
OWEN: Don’t you see!? Tootsie Rolls! Tootsies, like toes! In my pocket!
GEORGE. (Flatly.) Isn’t that amazing. Are you going to let me have one, or not?
(OWEN divides them into two equal portions, carefully, one and one, two and two, etc. He walks the length of the boat
and drops George’s portion into his palm. GEORGE puts them into his own pocket. )
(OWEN, back at his end, scans with binoculars).
GEORGE: You know, we might not see any whales. We probably won’t.
OWEN: That’s OK. (Rests the binoculars back on his chest.)
GEORGE: (Irritated.) I thought that was the thing you most wanted to do? I thought that’s why we were out here.
OWEN: (Raises the video camera again and turns it to GEORGE.) Here’s my brother-in-law again. He’s a smart guy about
a lot of things. (Pause.) Not everything. Here we are in his little boat. (Pans around boat, back to GEORGE). Two guys.
They survived the broken-down boat for ten minutes, and they didn’t have to crack open any bones. They only
tormented one another, as all good brothers-in-law should. And were honest, except when they were dishonest.
(GEORGE waves his hand at OWEN, dismissively but with grudging amusement.)
OWEN: (Still filming.) George doesn’t know that Owen has a package of beef jerky in his bag. George is a pretty good
captain, except he mistook his cabin boy for a first mate. Also, he should have a crow’s nest, so he could climb up and
get a better look for whales, which all the old whalers knew were hard to see from sea-level. Also, he allows himself to
be distracted so that he is, for example, not attentive to the ocean behind him, where there’s a boat coming to his
rescue.
(At this, GEORGE snaps around. Sees what OWEN has seen, and grabs an oar from the boat bottom and begins waving
it high in the air.)
OWEN: (Still filming, shouting.) Ahoy! Ship ahoy, me matey! Ship ahoy!
GEORGE: (Turning, while waving oar.) You will not tell Judith I didn’t have a toolbox.
OWEN: You won’t tell her I’m an idiot.
GEORGE: Deal.
(END)
26
Peter Porco
Mother & Child in a Garden
Hannah, beautiful child, blinded from birth, smiles at the feel of her mother’s face, the firm cheekbones, the hollow
below, the pliable flesh, the small animal flutter of the eyelids, the quick upturn of Lucretia’s head, mother offering
mouth and chin to Hannah’s hungry fingers, the child luxuriating in the moist warmth of Lucretia’s lips.
The magpie in a branch of the beech whose great trunk supports Lucretia’s back might imagine that the child is gazing
at it as it regards the child, but it probably knows Hannah cannot see it. The finches pecking close beside the picnic
blanket sense they are secure, despite Hannah’s spirited straddling of her mother’s lap.
Likewise, the boar whose great whiskered head is just now emerging from the dense brush into the clearing feels
certain it is about to taste the power and thrill of its tusks goring a hated foe. Hannah’s smile is just starting to fade at
the rough new sound, Lucretia’s head is turning sharply towards the thrashing brush, the birds have already taken wing
when Johann, standing at the other end of the clearing, squeezes the trigger, driving a blast of pellets into the boar’s
head and chest, something the animal failed to anticipate.
27
Poetry
Marjorie Kowalski Cole
Water
“What do you think,” I whispered,
Is the traditional gift for a sixth anniversary?
You whispered back,
“Water.”
One August day,
Canadian kids back in school,
our two kayaks skated alone
over water deep and cold and absolutely still,
as if Lake Superior were meditating on its own clarity.
We ran the boats up onto a boulder
and bare skin met warm granite
until helicopters filming a Park Service video
chased two lovers from a private world
On a flooded gravel pit back home in Fairbanks
I paddled a craft that you created
from plywood, glue and stitches,
turned over to me for its maiden voyage.
Go ahead, you said, and with those words
gave me that still brown pond,
filled with upside down trees
and secret places where ducks nested behind the willows.
On a lakeshore in Michigan.
I watch a family of mergansers ride up
and down the waves, and suddenly,
I remember rivers. The Chena slowing
after her ride through the hills,
undercutting the bank, dropping spruce
whole into the current,
the Nenana roaring past the carcass of a whale
who missed her turn out in Norton Sound
and Tolovana Creek cooling the hot springs,
inviting with steam
the wicked, the loose, the courting, the lost.
Years ago, we flung ourselves forward on skis
over windy, bald summits, carrying
gear enough to keep us alive at twenty below zero
eleven miles to reach that valley
where hot water rises
from a fault in the earth’s crust.
When we climbed in, comet Hale-Boggs
was pasted on the night sky
and a ring of cedar planks
held us red and steaming, coopered together
in the stream.
28
Wildlife on Old Wood Road
Six a.m., returning home at first light,
my headlamp startles a white ptarmigan.
It flies up from the edge of the road
to hide in the aspen, its black tail wings a shock.
Silent and fast it transforms from a fat bird
to triangular fighter. A moose appears
huge, silent and complete
against the trees. Two calves with her, giant teenagers.
Her ribs press against the brown suitcase of her hide.
She looks, to me, exhausted.
This morning my eyes are filling with tears.
I'm back in my mother's last year,
I'd like to do it over, I'd like
to be there again.
A fox separates from the snow uphill
orange fur fluffed out for warmth
slips down the road and into the woods.
Solitary, even though head of a household.
She was that way--she never once complained
of the solitude, or the silence.
Is it wrong to see the world of the animals
intersect with mine, to see boundaries
unfixed. All things brush one another,
have the power to astonish, adjust,
even comfort. I swing left and return
to my cave, the snowfree garage
the coffee, a warm and sleepy mate
upstairs under the quilt. He could teach a cat
how to relax. The comforts of my nest restore me
to this world. For now I am fully a creature
of this hour, though it mixes with the next.
John Baalke
It’s All Downhill From HereStone sheep cross a ridge
in the St. Elias Range,
I blend the morning’s fog
in a bottle with my breath,
a ewe scuffs windblown snow,
uncovers lichen and moss,
amid the devil’s club, growing
lush in countless ravines.
a lamb curls in the pit of her belly.
Come spring, wobbly legs emerge,
In time, the mix wells
in my throat, emanates
followed by a golden eagle, talons
clutching the steamy innocent.
from cracked lips. Coarse stubble
mimics a riffle downstream
Dried blood surrounds the remains
like a frame as blowflies swarm.
and tears flow from crow’s feet,
slip from high-country to low.
I hail the evening sun like a cab.
The driver wants to know
Where to? as he hefts my bag
into the trunk.
29
Randol Bruns
Fresh WaterThe seagulls circle and scream,
and will not approach the dead
bearded seal washed up on the beach
lying against a piece of white
driftwood half buried in the sand.
Along the Bering Sea coast
the Cup’ik people say
the seal comes to you,
for a drink of fresh water.
John kneels down and takes out his knife
makes a cut across the forehead,
this will allow the seal’s spirit
to escape he says
a westerly wind is beginning
to blow white swells out on the Bering
Sea cold rain starts to fall.
We walk the wavering line of salt
water lapping ever farther up.
Looking back the gulls are
gathering among the tangle
of driftwood that washes up
after every storm. The noisy gulls
move closer to the seal
whose open mouth must have caught
the first drops of rain.
Walking back to the village
the smoke is spiraling out
of the muki. In this small shack
there are men with their backs pressed
against burning walls straining
to protect lungs from the steam
sucking the searing air
through woven mouthplugs
of dried goose grass.
Fresh water is constantly
ladled onto the rocks, stacked
on a glowing red barrel stove.
Catching My KingMy father said you've got to go
down the muddy banks walk out
into the current, carefully
cast your line deeper
into the water darker
darker than I could see running
past and wait for what happens
besides the usual, tangles
arguments and broken lines.
That's it, he said you've got to see
what the early morning brings
when all manner of things
are still possible
and it was, a dime bright male fresh
from the deepest oceans
sea lice still clinging.
With my King flopping furiously
another fisherman ran to help
haul it back to shore
where I clubbed it
with a piece of driftwood
stuck it with my knife
till it lay still, bled quietly
and all the currents ran red
for awhile.
30
Marilyn Borell
Home Front
Downstairs,
where interior walls meet,
a flower blossoms overnight
in green carpeting,
fungus the color of
old toenails, feel
of a baby’s ears.
I reach deep,
find an amorphous
base melded
to carpet fibers
like candle drippings.
What temerity in this thing, born
between concrete slab
and jute backing. How
many others wait
beneath the floor, to spring
their pale existence
into mine?
31
Alexandra Appel
Anchorage City Poems #52
beneath my feet the street lamps form circles in the hoary dark
I follow the rusty railroad tracks to the bog at the end of Lois Street
my dog eager, tail wagging
black spruce hold fast in the bog, deformed and gallant
beg mercy from a lowering sky,
my doggie lifts his leg leaving his mark
mountains to the east light with the last glow from the sinking sun.
I recall Mother's ill-conceived Chopin
and lambchops, baked potatoes, a supper of innocence
pond ice forms on the dull surface of the bog
magpies, my old friends, skirt the surface of thin ice,
I know I can not go there
or return to the scree strewn ridges in the east, or to the icy peaks
five hundred miles distant and the sting of the Kuskokwim
blowing unevenly against my cheeks. I know when I will leave this place
no one will call me back not even the magpies with their incessant chatter
I tidy my affairs, walk my dog
savor what I call my own, all I once loved I still love
32
Carolyn Edelman
Walking Alee
of Wild RosesI am standing in the doorway of my parents’ room
and I know I shouldn’t go in.
But my father is out plowing or harvesting or milking,
and my mother—she must have gone to hang clothes
on the line.
I hesitate, remembering.
My eyes scan the room.
The air sparkles in dusty suspense.
I see the dark stained furniture, carved, turned—
bought at Saturday auction after the calves were sold—
the bed at my eye level, covered in chenille,
the wardrobe, so squeezed at the foot of the bed
the drawers can’t be opened,
and the dresser, where my mother could sit at the mirror.
Her lipsticks and powders are inside its little drawers,
and on its top, a procession of bottles—
one, Channel No. 5 that Uncle John sent during the war.
Only an oily residue remains, and a memory
when the glass stopper is lifted.
The dresser’s elegant oval reflects the doorway and me.
I watch myself tiptoe wide-eyed into that private space,
up close to the mirror, and look at my self.
In double image my small fingers touch one of her bottles—
cool milky glass embossed with red roses.
On Sunday mornings before church
my mother splashes it on—Rosewater—
it’s good for her skin, she says.
I twist the cap, hold the bottle to my nose,
and breathe in my mother, the woman of her.
Now, here I am walking a sandy path alee of wild roses.
A southeasterly breeze flutters off Icy Passage,
lifts rose essence and hands it to me. And unexpectedly
I inhale the residue of the woman, my mother,
and a remembered scent of the child, my self.
33
Marion Boyer
Gustavus, Alaska, Pop. 301
There are two roads in Gustavus,
two docks, one mercantile,
and too few words for rain.
The woman steering our taxi
with one hand, her right arm stretched
across the car’s seat back says,
We call this driving mist.
Moss comforts the ground, lumpy
as the baggy sweater she wears.
Moisture beads cow parsnip and fireweed,
fungus ladders spruce trees.
You won’t want to be doing that moose call
of yours around here in October, girl.
Gustavus is the far place, cool as a shell,
raw, wet as the birth of a moose.
I guess most of us wanted to be far away
from something or other.
She grips this spit of land scraped flat
by glaciers. Winter, she hunkers low
like the odd-eyed halibut. She’s selling
a local cookbook as she drives.
I like this recipe, “Rusty’s Butt Boils”
for your halibut steaks.
Fog irons the bay flat. Sea kelp
washes in, brown and gelatinous,
like entrails on the rocks.
34
Michael Earl Craig
Bear Photo
Taken in Livingston, Montana
sometime around 1900,
this bear stands up perfectly straight
on hind legs, with his paws
together, up over his head
like maybe he’s clapping,
like maybe he’s praying
or pretending to pray,
really hamming it up,
but I’d say probably praying,
probably praying directly to God,
yeah, praying hard, directly to God.
It is a sunny day.
The photo is grainy.
The bear is shuffling about in the dirt street.
Dragging his hundred pound chain.
Squinting into the sun.
Acting quite naturally.
Totally clueless as to how a man might pray.
Bluebirds
I’m sitting in my brown chair.
I have dirt under each of my fingernails.
Except for the pinkies.
I remember hearing of
the gorgeous town blonde
who told reporters
she’d never date a man with
dirt under his nails.
It’s a poet’s job
to be dragged by an ankle
through town.
A poem shouldn’t require
a lot of book learning
to understand, I once wrote,
and Tina leaned
over my desk and said,
To understand what?
I didn’t say anything.
Trying again I wrote
in capital letters THE READER
CAN ALMOST BE DUMB REALLY
AND STILL GET MY POEMS.
Tina nodded her head.
The ankle caught up
in the stirrup of a galloping
horse.
I slump over in my chair.
It’s like I’m covered in bluebirds.
Little brilliant ones.
And when I say this,
“little brilliant ones,”
I lisp a little like a man
who’s been punched hard in the mouth
but still wants to talk bluebirds.
35
Gretchen Diemer
El Agua
Zurita knows what the water knows--.Martin Espada
...and what does water know
flowing over rocks,
exposing evidence of the last
forty or forty-thousand years?
What does water hear,
filling the earth’s dry potholes
soothing welts on a wordless tongue?
You drop your hands,
two stones, into the sea
full of dishes and foam.
You have imagined
a body without
water, a land without
lakes or rivers, the dried beds
shrinking, fish gazing
skyward, imagining legs and wings,
the urge to rise up, the need to fly.
36
Sherry Eckrich
Garden Party
Sunday at two, potluck, Jack said.
Golden dabs of dying leaves still
cling fiercely to birches, others line the woodland
floor
behind the house. Yesterday the red line
rose only to thirty-seven.
Last night’s first hard freeze trailed
after unexpected sleet and rain,
leaving icy disks in the leaves of the cabbage.
At Jack’s, friends collect his crop remains,
pick the surviving beans, fill grocery bags
with carrots and turnips torn from the earth,
and stack corn neatly by the wooden fence.
We overflow the tiny living room
ripe with memories of the eighteen years he spent
with Sharon. Cold drafts blow as
doors open again and again.
Standing on the kitchen stoop, Jack looks tired.
He smiles and hugs all who approach.
It was Sharon’s garden. She loved it.
I knew she’d never make it through this winter.
He laughs as though to shake the chill
and introduces her first husband,
another friend to share the grief.
Creases left by years of smiles
grow wet as he talks of her last six hours.
She passed peacefully. We pumped the morphine
every ten minutes. She didn’t feel any pain.
I was right there when she went.
In the kitchen, women quip, cut squash, potatoes,
and yellow Russian turnips for stew. Outside,
men scrub bright orange roots, trim the green tops
for compost. Have one, Jack offers,
as a colander of carrots goes past.
It’s all organic, grown naturally. Eighteen years ago
we met and never were apart, not even for a day.
Bowls heaped with food crowd the counters,
aromas fill the spaces left in her kitchen:
butter beans and ham, black-eyed peas and side
meat,
thin sliced moose steaks, chicken fried at home,
and biscuits bigger than Jack’s gentle fist.
Macaroni salad, Sharon’s recipe, Carmela says,
teary-eyed. I never made it before.
She would have served it if she’d been here,
so I made it just like hers.
Football plays on the color screen in the living
room,
while in the yard, men in worn jackets gather
round
the lifted hood of Jack’s truck, discussing engines.
Inside, Jack shares years of garden photos, of
harvests,
of a smiling Sharon in her straw hat, kneeling
between mounded rows of dark soil.
Take vegetables with you, as much as you want.
I can’t eat them all alone.
37
Jo Going
Mountain Lion
All day following your tracks
through untrodden snow,
the crunch of my snowshoes,
the silence of your passing.
Past ice cascades of aqua,
and moss hung spruce,
your prints leading
slowly, patiently,
your glance in the shadows.
Crossing the avalanche
into the clearing;
the frozen tarn in a cirque
of winter peaks cut white
before a brightness of blue.
You disappear,
then come again,
your fur and mine melding
in a glistening light.
Again Winter
Still and again,
the quietude of winter,
a bowl fulll of snow
rhymed with cobalt.
Caribou drifting,
pawing the lichen,
shaping the tundra.
The scent of fox,
musky, forbidden;
the lingering damp of wet wool.
In the woodpile, ermine,
her tiny tracks
link dream and doorstep.
I chop wood, listening
to sound split the silence—
bells across the frozen river.
Winter comes
deep in the bones, staking
a claim beneath the ribs.
Inside, I light the lamps,
and sit in silence,
quilted and quieted,
still and again.
38
Eric Heyne
Accretions
The stiff white world built
by two months’ growth
of hoarfrost and no wind
sheds a new color each hour
in the sun sneaking up
from the south. But one
day of chinook and
it’s all gone to black,
the spruce shedding water
and swallowing light. So
the winter’s burden dissolved
in the south wind’s shade
before we knew how much
we wanted to stay frozen.
39
Found (“Fetters of a burning chain”—Julia Ward Howe)
Stained white bark grows around links rusted
to the color of earth, one thick hook wedged
into place, the other end buried in leaves, held
to the ground by willow and horsetail roots.
Something was anchored once to this tree,
hauling itself from the mud it was stuck in,
or else the tree itself was marked and bound
for falling. Whichever it was, the arms
that looped the logging chain around this birch
forgot it, like Frost’s well-made woodpile
abandoned to rot, far from the fire
it was meant to feed. Ochre flakes of dust
on my hands smell like death, like the other end
is fastened to a grave I have dug myself.
40
Ann Dixon
Winter Ptarmigan
Dappled snow erupts
feathers startling toward sky
each stuttered wing beat
dusting my trail
with crumbs of light.
Erling Friis-Baastad
The Hunter
I wake alone and early
to await the sun
and his herd
of yellow birches
All is ready
I have prepared my net
of hope and want
Come back, whoever
scattered dry leaves
whoever hid a treasure
among pale roots
I’ll press my hand
against cold bark
transcribe the map
into my flesh
I’ll trace the path
It’s all I ask
Come back
41
B. Hutton
Sunday, 12/19/04 7:45AM
already up an hour dark dark ice sheen silence out there on the street and for days/nights now hovering just
at/above/below freezing more rain than snow more spring than winter more slick than soft or solid walking and
yesterday slipping out at work onto the deck sneaking smoke when nobody watching or even up yet and i mean spring
like more than a metaphor blue sky break your heart with fullness of it freshness some openness of out from under
winter blankets air in your face expansiveness like something growing somewhere something growing inside your
head your heart some knowing of how wide the world how endless windows wide open to everything your whole body
shifting down into underdrive no tension of anticipation of shiver no weight of bulk of multi-layer shield yourself from
cold only brisk envigorating welcome of air sky light on your skin illusion of months ahead uninterrupted of the same
and even though knowing it is only fool’s gold false spring just enough to fool your body remind your body replenish
your body take you to that place that time that willing suspension of disbelief surrender to content no contention no
counting the gift-horse’s teeth no calculating estimated time of departure just accept the gift gladly say thank you.
thank you.
and this morning open window stick your head out more of the same add holy sunday morning silence of the only one
up on earth watch sparse sparse spread-out pointilism of pin-prick snowflakes slowly slowly slow descending float turn
to raindrops just a moment before they hit the sidewalk plunge silent into surface of the puddles well worth sticking
head out of window again again again again.
again.
breathe deep. savor air.
again.
say thank you.
Anchorage - 12/19/04
42
Amy Otto Larsen
Norma's Cove
"Solid stone is just sand and water, baby....
and a million years gone by. "
--Beth Nielsen Chapman
The peaks across Kachemak
bright white in the lessening light,
tide a gentle lap on stones.
glimmers on the Spit wink on,
a talkative eagle drifts overhead.
Pam's white jacket a beacon ahead of me.
Anthracite slips underfoot.
Sea, beach, bluff:
a microcosm.
Steep stairs clamber up
to houses tottering on the edge,
decks hang in space,
netting and birch logs adorn the banks.
Challenging wind and water:
four yards too late.
Fool's LakeThe sun in going down
the last dying sparks of the day
dazzling on the water.
The dock is still warm
beneath my bare thighs.
You said I had the greatest-looking legs
in the whole county.
A whippoorwill cries from across the lake,
a canoe bobs gently at its moorings,
wood smoke wafts from the campground.
The moon will rise soon.
Where are you?
43
Ernestine Hayes
Old Tom Brings Water into the World
Old Tom
Walking along a beach
He feels thirsty
He remembers a bossy old neighbor
Where he once lived
In those days when he lived in a house:
Family
Children
Warmth
Food
Anyway that know-it-all neighbor
He always had a bottle he kept in a trunk
Next to an old brown couch
Slept on that couch, one hand on the trunk
Inside of which was always that bottle
Old Tom
Walking along a beach
Thinks hard about that bottle
He thinks hard about that bottle
Not so much
About his own house next door
Family
Children
Food
Warmth
Staggers over to Village Street
Sorts through all the dogshit
Knocks on the old neighbor’s door
Invites himself in, sits around for a while
Until his neighbor falls asleep
Runs outside newspaper in hand
Picks up some dogshit, runs back inside
Smears it on his neighbor’s pants
Laughs
Waits
Keeps his eye on the trunk
That old neighbor finally wakes up
Smells the dogshit, sees Old Tom
Laughing at him, hollering
Look at you! You shit yourself! Look at you!
Minutes ago, that neighbor was high-toned
Now he’s more like a yelled-at dog
Runs to the back of the house
Holding his dirty pants
Old Tom grabs the bottle from the trunk
Runs outside takes a drink
Expecting wine or at least stale beer
But Old Tom tastes fresh water
He runs into the woods up the hill
Over the path through the trees
Beyond the treeline past the snowline
Spitting out water the whole way
Spitting out water to the world
44
Old Tom’s Hands
Old Tom’s hands are crusty with need
He keeps those nails short
Old Tom’s hands are pungent with life
He takes comfort from the smoky touch
Old Tom’s hands are peeling and torn
They stand up to whiskers and booze
He uses his hands to break salmon in two
With his hands he tempts Tide Woman
Old Tom’s hands hold the bottle and shake
When they carry it to his lips
Below the tide, sea lions sweep the streets
And carve dreams into their screens
While hunters idle and medicine won’t heal
One simple wound from a pious stranger
Old Tom’s been broken by those cuts
But he can tempt that tide one more time
He can summon warriors with one glimpse
Of his working wine-stained hands
45
Janet Levin
Tribute
for Vedran Smailovic
I.
After bombs burned the national library to the ground,
after shrapnel hit the breadline and scattered bodies
lay
still as loaves, after then
one day
and then daily
the cellist offered a musical prayer for peace. Playing
in the ruins, bombsites and graveyards
the man with the strings sat in full view of snipers' scopes.
White gloves, bow tie
and tails, he drew
his bow slow, drawing out sound from wood,
music pouring from him like tears, he played
a deep vibration he felt in his cells.
Sound that originates before Sarajevo,
sound that travels;
far from Sarajevo
here, and now
hearts hear
a plaintive melody
crying, a call
to the dead and the living: How many more?
The bullets,
if they come
his faith deflects.
II.
Those who followed
Carthage and the conquistadors also reconstructed
on the ashes of sacred places,
with a small heap of wampum, built Manhattan
towering skyscrapers
now reduced to rubble called The Pile,
a newly sacred place, made so
by so many ashes.
III.
Under the blue October moon
inside the house I burrow
under blankets with a book. My body is tight, tense
muscles holding up the bones, which are chilled
because the house is cold.
The house is cold, there is a hole in the wall
on one side, heat blasted out
in September
shortly before fall.
Shortly before fall, four flights last rites
now the house is cold, my body is tight,
a fight between bones
and corpuscles, cells and blood
jarred into action by alleged invisible forces
some are calling evil.
Some are calling evil
forth to fight the cold that seeps inside the house
through the hole in the wall
that chills my bones, makes my body tight
a fight in the night, invisible
forces, evil and good, opposite sides, the same coin.
The same coin, capitalism, Islam, black
and white, right
and wrong, long
or short fight between invisible good
and evil
forces. Fall approaches winter, Taliban hurl widows
into graves, their stadium
is not for fans unless you consider execution
sport.
Sport stopped in September for a moment
46
stadiums made empty by
fear, now Congress is empty, my heart
is empty, blood spilled
like tears at Ground Zero, blood chilled like my heart
in the house which is cold.
In the house which is cold, the mail room
is empty as Congress,
resolve melted like steel
at Ground Zero, bones chilled by blood sport
between rivals
inside and outside the house, a hole in the wall in the fall
a chill enters
my body is tight, tense
muscles contracted in cold.
Contracted in cold in the house
I'm not bold, bones chilled by blood sport, I burrow
in the bunker, hunkered down
under blankets with a book to soothe
my soul under the blow of blasting implosion,
bombs far away
exploding
under the same blue October moon,
the same blue October moon, the same blue October moon
which beams like a beacon
on the beleaguered.
47
Sean Patrick Hill
Freezeout Creek
Dorian was his name. Bought land on Freezeout Creek ten years back. People thought it strange he surrounded himself
with cyclone fencing. Too much to maintain. No reason to keep deer out when crops won’t grow.
Claimed he was a merchant marine part of the year. The rest he might have worked in town, or on a ranch. No one
remembers. But folks recall the truck he drove was missing its handle on the inside passenger door. No one gave it
much thought. They all drove beater rigs.
When the agents showed up, they found skulls all along the footbridge. All different kinds of animals. Firewood piled
like an ambuscade. The cabin bolted and padlocked with iron.
There was a girl who drove up this road around that time. She must have hiked the ridge to Hell’s Canyon. She thought
to call her parents from the Imnaha Tavern. That’s how they found her car. They never found her.
They locked him up, but inmates killed him. Who knows who bought his land, if anyone.
The creek goes up to the saddle. Cuts through volcanic ash. If you dig around arrowheads sometimes get exposed. You
never know what you’ll find in a bank.
48
Deb Liggett
Out the Back WindowSnow falling, cold.
Redpolls shiver snow
from feathers in
dim, morning light.
The birdfeeder the hub
of the hub-bub.
Clear, warming.
The sun
pulls over the mountains.
That damn squirrel
swings from the spruce boughs.
Magpies catcall from the rafters.
Breezy, bright sun.
Fireweed tops out.
Yarrow: orange, red.
Purple monkshood,
bee balm, beaked geranium.
The racket in the shed –
a squirrel rips out insulation.
They say the cost of heating oil
is going up.
Windy, cool.
Someone dims the lights.
Wing beats thrum south,
the sun rolls up summer.
Celebrants depart.
Now everyone
can get some sleep.
Storm
A kick-ass
crash-and-boom rain
slams the glass,
pelts down the pane,
sheets from the sill,
splays off the hard pan,
till, worn out,
the soft mist, the slow drip
off the pine,
the quiet.
49
Joan Kane
Nesting Chronology
Later, you would have liked me
Despite the rain that filled the night air
With white sound, unison. Yet
I recommend that you get on,
And follow the sandhill cranes,
Abundant in the long arc
Of their migration.
From flattened sedge
The clutch hatch after
A late spring. They dig
For roots with heavy bills,
Flightless. Soon
They will aggregate,
And stage. Soon I will
Kneel by brackish water,
Watch them circle—
Gain altitude, and
Move directly eastward.
Their calls will settle
In the hollows of birches,
Deep and constant.
It is their duty to warn you:
I, too, would listen.
The Fire
Nothing dry accumulates.
An assay of a blown glass
Bird, the unfastened
Patterns of fluted beads,
Silt and sand, or
Something fractured.
Talc, panes scattered,
A heavy vial, and then whole
Clear pharmacies, jars
And bottles. It does choose
What it does not break.
50
Susheila Khera
September 12, 2001
The sky quiet
and hardly anyone
in the stores.
Make Afghanistan
the 51st state
hand-lettered across
the dusty rear windshield
of an SUV in the lane ahead,
its edges browning with rust.
A row of 747s
lined up at the airport
like an orderly flock of giant seagulls
waiting for the storm to pass.
We’re out to see,
not in any hurry,
and take the old highway,
now a bumpy road
that winds by houses
tottering on uncertain permafrost.
Coming toward us as we round a curve
is our friend Ruben on his motorbike.
No helmet, just sunglasses
and a leather jacket and jeans,
leaning back in his seat.
He passes without seeing us
deep in thought,
riding under a blue sky
that doesn’t hold a single plane.
Pushing Off at Dusk
Our silver pea pod boat
floats on water dark and deep
that mirrors back the evening sky.
No need to look up.
The wide pink swath of a long-passed jet,
arced like a comet’s tail,
lies chalkstroke bold beside the boat.
No need to look up.
The contrail lingers in the sky
and on the bottom of the bay.
It disappears into the hills
that waver when our paddles dip.
No need to look up.
A heron rises from the shore,
the water rests still as ink,
the hills have turned to silhouettes.
Look up. Find the current. Steer.
51
Marie Lundstrom
Majesty Gone
The gaunt moose moves stiffly,
nibbling bare lilac twigs
gratefully, his beard
shaking like a wattle.
No wolves or cars
in a fenced yard.
Winter-chewed mountain ash,
willow not yet fluffed
with catkins or new leaves,
birch still bare.
He rests on old grass
in spruce shade
then stumbles to near woods:
an elder of his race,
majesty gone.
Perspectives
My stepdaughter calls
— the one who speaks to me —
another lifetime bubbles up.
I blink
at her bittersweet words.
She remembers what,
for me,
never happened.
Like circus parade watchers,
she on one side of the street,
I opposite,
we see one another
through clowns
and tiger cages.
52
Jason Marvel
Climbing Lazy Mountain
1.
Over the trail my feet
paddle the dry earth and
parch pieces where the land
is steep and man has quietly
stepped. When the rains come, water
will rush downhill by way of these
veins cut into the mountain. Now dry,
it leaves little to erase the powdered mist
that rises with each step, each digging
of toes. Thick clouds click
long and hard inside our mouths as saliva
mixes with silt and the quiet rush of
your voice brings me back
to our journey.
2.
Are we almost there,
you pant.
3.
Maybe it’s because I want you
to love me more or maybe this damn
mountain isn’t really lazy but
more like you and I, broken
limbed trees lining a path
to railroad ties and a picnic table.
But we’re together
and we must rest to drink
water and soothe our rusty throats.
4.
And I want this feeling
to end, the guilt and strain
of walking trails through alder
and fireweed. False peaks
where your heart grows and your head
shadows the rock face.
5.
Yet we move on,
lifting each other through falling
rock and loose earth,
rising again because we know
by the end the peak looks out
over the valley. There’s peace
in this, a peace that slows
the moments when the dry earth
cracks and the September rains
come. We quietly go in that direction.
53
David McElroy
In Your Snowflake Dream
You relax and fall with falling snow.
From dust you come, a tiny speck coated
with ice drifting fast in cirrus around a dome
of high pressure stalled over the Beaufort.
An Aleutian low with bad behavior gyres
north with enough vapor and heat
to mix things up. The H2O’s stick
and so you grow falling as snow.
It takes certain kinds of falling, cold,
and water to build on. Electricity
in your smallest parts shapes your hexagon,
and you relax, this falling into grace.
To and fro in regions of the wind
your crystal grows more ornate,
your path complex, your corners spiked,
branched, or feathered like no other.
You’re falling into big country, a bench
of black spruce along the Sheenjek.
You’re a smokejumper again,
and your crew is all in tuxedoes--
elegant for once. You sway down in parachutes
landing softly standing up. All ok, you sing out
your names, but from a distance they all sound
the same, wild, like geese in spring.
In My Deli Dream
You find me as you did years ago
on a bright spring day shoveling
horse manure into the pickup
for our garden of potatoes and simple salads.
I’m not a knight’s squire nor peasant in rubber
boots quick to know I shovel paradise
for weeds, but in this dream you say again, “Stop.
The day’s too nice, let’s go fishing.”
Still without child, we drop everything
and go, and it clouds up, and we’re skunked.
We rent a cabin without fixtures or heat
and pee in the rain and mud.
In our sleeping bag rich with the history
of human sleep, we bargain and trade,
banter and barter, my little dolma,
hungry in the rich market of love.
For what your eyes do imagining us
in San Francisco, I’ll be your Jamon Serrano,
your ham on sfillatino. For your full-bodied kiss
of house red and dip of garlic chanterelle,
accept my gorgonzola with sun-dried tomatoes
in drawn butter turmeric, salmon paté, and prawns
in mustard Creole. So begins a little commerce
under fir rafters and drumming roof of cedar.
Too soon good dreaming dissolves on loving.
With nonsense dreams are famous for,
it turns in good taste to moose moving
on the mountain, bear swimming to our island,
the sharp and earthy odor of leaves
on the hill in the rain and even after.
It turns prodigal to the garden and child
our garden grew. Oh, let’s dream it rich again,
and for your soft kiss of port, my dark-eyed partner,
and hard years as mother, I comfort you as best I can
with apples, pomegranate seeds in a blue bowl,
and something fancy, on good china this frangipani torte.
54
Buffy McKay
April, Austen, Anchorage
“The air is full of spices,” I read what Austen wrote.
Silver limns the sunrise; I watch the brightening shore.
A raven climbs warm rising currents, wing and wing, to float.
The raven chuckles, burbling; I see his swelling throat.
I wondered why he sang out then, as if we’d met before.
“The air is full of spices,” I read what Austen wrote.
I hear the working of his wings, his ruffling greatcoat.
The mudflats glisten, disappear beneath the tidal bore.
A raven climbs the rising currents, wing and wing, to float.
Scents of bracken, wrack, and rot, warm rustling sea oats,
the winter thaw, the sea – all perfumes that I long for.
“The air is full of spices,” I breathe what Austen wrote.
The raven banks, and flies toward me, repeats a quarter-
note
as if to mark the day and me, our traveling rapport.
A raven climbs the rising currents, wing and wing, to
float.
The sound of wings at sunrise is difficult to quote.
Winter turning to the spring fuses moments I adore.
“The air is full of spices,” I read what Austen wrote.
A raven climbs the morning currents, wing and wing, to
float.
55
How Spring Travels in
Alaska
I consider the buttons on my blouse:
each nacreous button glints
in light at the top of the world -
cold, tiny,
not insignificant.
Carved from linings of shells,
ferried through the skin of the sea
by a bronzed teenage boy,
lungs bursting, at the edge
of a Tahitian storm.
The cloth of my shirt has traveled
from Mumbai,
mapped in my mind with elephants,
fire-colored silk,
rice, curry, and fresh spinach.
My leather shoes, assembled in Mexico.
I want to assemble in Mexico,
ride a rocking boat
where billfish spear the teal-toned sea.
Dinner, gathered from remnants
of last summer’s fishing
and my favorite Asian-Alaskan grocery:
brined salmon eggs on rice with pickled ginger,
wasabi and shoyu;
an icy, sweating Coca-Cola;
one huge, globular
Florida orange.
Frost fingers the window behind me.
The radio voice announces
it is 47 below zero,
five degrees colder than yesterday.
Under snow, the river
seems to heave and breathe,
steam rising at dusk.
It talks to me in the midnight:
crackling, static,
ready to break its dam.
Rachel Mehl
The Place Where We Live
Ruby walks across the lawn
in Daisy Duke Shorts, a boy scout
scarf tied around her throat.
Her short bleached hair is knotted
in ponytails. We live in the gut
of the house bought with money
from her rape. Her mom said
they are still waiting for the rest
of the settlement. Ruby taps
her cigarette ash over my vegetable
starts. She is 19 and back from NY.
It didn’t work out with the rich guy
she met at Burning Man. The walls
of our apartment are orange
and purple. We can hear Ruby’s mom
shout through the low ducts.
There is a wet bar. It is stocked
with vodka and bitters.
56
John Morgan
A Memorial
Perhaps
Hauled up by a crane, bright saxophone
girders erect themselves in sky, the steel
untwisting like an awakening god, and on
the unfolding floors carpets unroll, the odd
desk appears, and workers materialize
and rally around the coffee machines. A file
drawer opens releasing a puff of smoke.
Each cubit of air recalls the tremor
but not the flames, the shouting or
shortness of breath, and through this
transparency a man stands on a platform,
wiping his eyes and stretching into space.
There’s nothing below him but morning
(no rattle of jets), as a flag goes up the pole.
Building down from the top, we’ve reached
the 93rd floor, where several aging veeps roll
up their sleeves and sip their 9 a.m. dram
of satisfaction, while how many knives in back
rooms sharpen for action and how
many cattle are driven to corporate slaughter?
(Nothing is bogus here, nothing made up.)
And everything’s in plain view to the old
cleaning woman in the twin invisible tower
a bucket of suds at her side. The stench of
burnt fuel sponged off, and only the white and blue
of empty floors below her like some hopeful saw
(repent? forgive?) that might turn the world around,
which a wand like a thought can pass through.
When the supports gave way, the upper
floors came down intact. For fifteen seconds
weightless, they fell, like an elevator
with a snapped cable, on top of the pancaking
lower stories which crushed everything below,
but while this was happening, they were above
the disaster and rode it down to the ground.
Counting Caribou Crossings—Prudhoe Bay, Alaska
after R. Glendon Brunk
Tundra to the horizon peppered with lakes,
aswim with pintails and loons. A fox lopes by.
The sky’s aslant with jaegers, rough-legged hawks.
I’m paid to tally caribou, a science guy.
Behind me a maze of pipes, pumps, drill-
pads, gravel pits, and sludge-smudged drums,
and everywhere the reek of corporate oil.
But hey, I’m here to count the herd, which comes
(if they come at all) too fast to count, then mill
when they hit the pipe. They mass and twitch, until
one coast-bound leader steps up, lifts her muzzle,
sniffs, while baffled calves and mothers nuzzle,
just as a truck roars by, blaring its god-
damn horn and they stampede away. I hate this job.
57
Doug Pope
Falling
I should have known
you could stumble and fall
when I was only two steps away.
We just wanted to kill time
before the parade.
How foolish of me to
put you down where
salmon berry bushes
crowd the trail,
camouflaging steep cliffs.
You start to roll.
I grab for your little sweatshirt and miss,
dive and gather you into my arms,
but we’re already over the edge,
funneled down a rocky avalanche chute,
me on my back, head first,
arms holding you tight to my chest.
We accelerate into a blur,
branches and brush and loose rocks
clawing at us,
drop over the first ledge,
airborne for an instant before my shoulders
take the blow on loose rocks.
My grip loosens, we brush a boulder,
you bounce from my arms,
I reach out,
feel you with my right hand,
pull you back to my chest,
just before the second ledge,
at the top of a bigger face,
a longer fall this time.
I don’t let go when we hit bottom.
You are still in my arms
when we slide into a thicket of alders and stop.
There isn’t a sound.
I see the bruise on your cheek.
You start to cry.
I stroke your face, and hear your mom
screaming my name from above.
58
Vic Cavalli
The Wedding Night
As night strengthened
The sharp edges of the mountains cut
The pink sky; I can still see it, as pink as an electric blanket covering an old
Gray woman again remembering the man she long ago said no to marriage
To because he seemed fanatical and actually believed.
With those primitive knives around us we felt defended.
I cuddled her full contact bare naked in an old Yukon arctic eider down bag
As the fire crackled and spit its red seeds into the darkness.
There is a great energy with a new wife completely naked in
A freshly deserted northern B.C. campground.
Massive bears had scared everyone away,
And whether we were fence post stupid
Or just too ignited to fear, we built an intense fire.
And there in flames, with the mystified
Grizzlies watching from the darkness, silent, invisible—pushed back
By our circle of hot light—we conceived
The first of seven sons in ecstasy.
59
Mark Muro
green lakeLike that time I was tripping
in the park on a painfully beautiful day
and I sat down to rest on the perfect greengreen grass
right in a pile of dogshit.
Or that time again thirty years later
and it seemed like nothing
had changed or moved from where it used to be-
the sunshine, the dogshit, the people walking around the lake.
All the painful beauty was still there,
where I left it.
I felt the same as I did then.
I felt deranged.
I probably looked that way, too
with a can of apricot soda resting on my shoe
eating the salt of pretzel sticks from my shirt pocket.
I sat there and watched it all go by:
pretty girls as big as planets
pendulous mommies on the jog
three Winona Ryders with zits
woman like salmon
woman like shrimp
endless sweaty thighs and rosy cheeks
an oily sheen of sunlight on green lake.
And I saw myself feeling
the way the worms work underneath it all
unseen and silent
while the sky falls over a girl with tungsten hair.
In a wall to wall painting
with ice cream bells in the background.
It was three o’clock and I hit the lull.
I found a shady bench and zipped up my jacket.
More people worth watching were passing by
but I had to pass on that pleasure
and close my eyes
Sure. I can understand. What’s not to understand?
Cain broke with Able
Nietzsche broke with Wagner
Jung broke with Freud
Dean broke with Jerry
John broke with Paul
And now, you-
You need a break.
I understand…
the need
the force
the desire for a net
I can substitute this for that
and still
there is no this but that-
these bright moments
coming from nowhere
a procession of angels
reeling against the hours
holding nothing back
kissing everything at once
floating above the past
suspended in the gift
outside the grip
connected
a moment when life comes with a smile
when the world exhales
and throws a halo on your head
a moment when just being here
under the sun
is triumph enough
when dreams dance with faith
and each breath sustains the potential of all things
when the ritual of observation
becomes a miracle to behold
because its all true-
she crossed her legs on this very bench
a million days ago
and where I sit now
a bird has landed
and a song plays
and over there, along the fence
dormant bulbs lie rumbling.
60
spaghetti
western
sergio pins a tin star
to the nearest salami
and sends out a posse
for chianti and bread
giancarlo mounts his gucci
has a doppio
and rides off
to round up the meatballs
ennio grabs a cactus
and a hunk of cheese
and strums a tarantella
until the water boils
there’s a big shootout
with garlic bullets
olive oil banditos
charles bronson
and lots of splattered tomatoes
fat angelina sets the table
the apache bring cannoli
the navajo anisette
lino builds another coffin
and stirs the sauce
Jon Wesick
Wreck Beach
Take the path down the hill from UBC1
through gentle forests of fern and evergreen.
Follow it down to the beach and find a garden.
Women sprout nude from white sand,
grow, and ripen in the summer sunshine.
Breasts emerge from stifling bras,
forsake taunting behind obscene nylon,
and breathe the cedar-scented air.
Don’t be a voyeur! Unbutton your inhibitions.
Slip out of your shorts and shyness.
I hear the sound of motors. Quick, get dressed!
A hovercraft lands on the beach.
Men in the black uniforms step onto the sand.
Dozens of naked Polynesian women
walk toward Captain Cook’s sailing ship
bearing gifts of flowers.
1. University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
61
Pamela Porter
Pentimento
When I climbed down the cliff by rope,
a heron fished from a boulder below, stretching her neck
the way a monk in prayer leans
toward a page of chant.
A seaplane, blustering animal, took flight,
but did not distract her, nor did I,
nor the migrating clouds,
the massed choir of pines.
From their nest of twigs
a pair of eagles rose,
hovered in wind over the stone
crest of the hill,
and like the presence felt in a room
where someone has died,
I almost glimpsed
what I was before entering this world.
Debbie Nigro
Eriophorum
68 degrees north latitude
June
The white intent of the tundra
62
Steve Treacy
Beastly Night A sea-born gale howls through the beastly night,
spraying our coastal tundra with false tears
siphoned from moving pinnacles of foam
streaking the surface of an Arctic sea.
The exhalation of a bowhead whale,
emerging in this frothy tempest for
a stolen opportunity to breathe,
won’t warm the icy fingers of this wind.
Like polar bears smashing through smooth white roofs
of ringed seal nurseries, her freezing blasts
pound brutally across our crystal land,
never counting the bodies of the dead.
The sharpness cuts into the backs of wolves
near musk ox huddled in the blowing snow.
Thrusts pierce their battlement of horn and fleece
to finish off a trembling wounded calf.
Like emissaries from the dead, the gusts
invade my room. Their empty whistling masks
the rhythmic beating of a heart spilling
its warmth onto our cold bloodthirsty plain.
I cannot sleep. Outside, the siren wind,
now keening for the slain, mimics remorse.
Wrapped in a wool blanket, my body feels
encircled by her silken web of fear.
Paul Winkel
Brown Mare
The dark brown mare stands with her colt,
head high, left forefoot raised,
poised to run.
A girl’s soft hands
smoothed the blanket,
positioned the heavy saddle,
cinched the girth.
Now a mother, her strong hands
remember the pull of the reins.
Legs know rippling muscles,
body the familiar sway.
Her son’s chubby hands
clutch the mane.
He gallops across the carpet,
charges into battle.
A carved ebony mare stands with her colt,
left forefoot broken in forgotten play,
poised to run.
63
Tonja Woelber
Aid and Comfort
Some days even the sun
failed to move her, bed a horizontal prison
where she lay fighting for breath
between sheets of metal, afraid
to speak for words can fall to earth,
crush the innocent, there’s no telling
what terrible damage can be done
and never undone, never, the weight
even of thoughts can bruise an arm purple.
A person can work black magic without
meaning to. Souls seared clear of feeling
line the wall, blood-drained trophies.
She squeezes her eyes shut, and a voice
pierces the silence. “Mom,” he says,
“Mom, can you get up? I can’t reach the counter.”
Gravity shifts. Her chest rises.
She forces her feet to the floor.
“Yes,” she says, “Yes, honey, I’m coming.”
Nancy Woods
Remembering Harding LakeYou know that lake
that round, ripple-skinned lake
that bowl-bottomed lake
that's lined with grass?
Would you meet me there
to shed our personalities
at the shore
along with our skin color
parents and places of birth
to dip soul naked
into the deep
and risk coming out just human?
64
Kathleen Tarr
The soul like water, will find a place to go I.
And so the Migrant Woman - the woman who was not
Tlingit, not Tsimshian, not Eyak, the one who is not of this place, who has
no tribal clan, no tribal mask, no Eagle or Raven name - she went
to where wind meets the sea at Ocean Cape, as often as she could.
2.
Everywhere she turned in Yakutat: water—water frozen water
free running. Water seeped and spilled into glacial streams, rivers,
salt-water lagoons, wetlands, bogs and sloughs.
Rain fell hard. Gales blew. Storms swept in. Winds battered.
It's rough out there, fishermen said. And then the North Pacific hurled
and dumped a few more hemlock logs like Tinker Toys along the beach;
boulders crushed and hammered to bits.
3.
Seawind tussled her copper-red hair. She daydreamed.
The prophet mountain loomed over her.
Perpetual rain-sounds beat against her heavy, yellow jacket.
A shaman chanted and drummed.
Something stirred.
4.
Beauty is exhausting
here in the Grand Wash of the never-
resting ocean. Don't leave me here; please
don't leave me here.
65
Scott Banks
I wore cowboy boots to work today I wore cowboy boots to work today
And I listened to country music on the radio
As I drove the four-lane lone prairie.
In a mood.
Listening to the lyrics
Acting like I shot your dog.
You left me.
I left you and
Your cheatin’ heart.
I own a pickup truck,
But it’s tricked out for a dandy.
No gun rack or eight ball for the gearshift knob.
Bucket seats where there should be bench.
And it’s clean.
I don’t chew tobacco although I tried it once
and ended up sprawled on the floor,
My head spinning like I’d
Been bucked off a mechanical bull.
The boots caused a stir in the office.
At the end of the day my feet hurt, although
The buttery leather caressed my
Soles as if they believed my life would be more interesting
If I wore them more often.
66
Cinthia Ritchie
Eve in Homer, AlaskaYou be Eve, he said,
handing me a peach because they were on sale
at the Safeway, and he was
a man of thrift and common sense
with a pension plan and health
insurance and nylon socks rolled
color to color in his third drawer.
Peach juice sliding
down my lips, another man
would have licked it off,
but he took a napkin,
dabbed my mouth with the
sureness of a mother,
those pale, smooth hands
intent on casting out my sins.
So I was forced to invent more,
nights the sun barely set
and the waves pounded the shore,
my blood aching with a thirst
he couldn’t swallow as I roamed
the beach dreaming of motorcycle
rides and men with wallet-chained pockets,
my skin suffering the bruises
of their slaps, each one welcomed,
treasured.
In the mornings,
I told him the marks were
from falls. Like Eve,
I understood the enticement
of a lie. I was wicked
and ungrateful, longing
not for the serpent’s bite
but its teeth tearing
my flesh as I burned and gasped.
Let the damned apple rot,
I wanted it all:
blood, bone, the white
teeth of muscle shining
my skin with the fallen
grace of salt.
Destruction Bay, YukonFog across the water,
it’s hard to see the mountains,
we’ve been camped here for days,
your body so familiar it feels
like my own skin, ordinary, warm,
the surprise of no surprises,
we swim through nights without
darkness, wake to
eagles down the beach,
bear prints around the tent,
we hang our food from tree branches,
drink dirty water,
sit on the shore for hours
losing our capacity for words,
mouths, meanings,
out here with the wind,
the waves,
the long cool stretches,
and wild.
67
INTERVIEWS
Mary Huyck Mulka
Kelsea Habecker
Hollowed Out
I’ve been thinking about weasels lately—brown and
oily weasels with gleaming, curved teeth ready to
scrape every last ounce of muscle from my ribs. I’ve
been thinking about polar bears, too, and flailing arms
carried off into the shadows of an icy night. And about
the possibility of the sun failing to break the horizon
tomorrow morning. It’s dark, I know. It’s Kelsea
Habecker’s fault.
In her debut collection of poems, Hollow Out (New
Rivers Press, 2008), Kelsea has painstakingly recreated
the isolation and desolation she experienced and
witnessed during the five years she spent as a
preschool teacher in an Inupiat village north of the
Arctic Circle. The effect is devastating. As I read,
Kelsea’s chilly words crept into my subconscious in
ways that I didn’t even realize until, days after I put
down the poems, I found myself blinking against the
sensation of tears freezing in their ducts and the sting
of incisors piercing my skin. Now, far removed from
that first reading, I’m still haunted by the image of a
bowhead whale pushing its skull through spring ice
and this warning from the collection’s namesake poem:
“the elders tell me to walk with my mouth / shut tightly
against the rivering wind / or the weasel, an
opportunist, / will launch into the current’s lift / toward
my dark throat / and tunnel my belly, / hollowing
through the meat of me / along the canal to my navel
and out / again into the cold blue world.”
If I had told Kelsea this, that her poems have touched
me in a way that too few poems do, she probably
would have laughed it off in disbelief, just as she defers
to humble embarrassment about the praise others
have already offered, including former Poet Laureate
Charles Simic, who selected the manuscript for
publication as a winner of the New Rivers Press Many
Voices Project. Simic (a poet whom Kelsea considers
“mesmerizing”) has not only called Hollow Out the best
writing about winter, snow and human solitude since
John Haines’ Winter News, but has also called it
“beautifully written, supremely intelligent and
consistently rewarding” and “one of the most moving
and original books of poems [he] has read in years.”
Kelsea, however, has remained incredulous that her
“little book” has garnered any attention at all beyond
her guaranteed audience of seven relatives; to her, it
seems, these poems are still little more than the
cathartic leftovers of coping with the bleakest facets of
Inupiat life, from child abuse to teen suicide. (As an
alternative to screaming fuck you at anyone and
everything around her, she says she turned to writing,
where she could at least take some control over
difficulty.) When I spoke with Kelsea, this bleakness
68
lingered in our conversation, as if living in proximity to
these poems again was difficult for her. Even if she has
now come to terms with their subject matter, she says
she couldn’t bear to look at these poems for a full year
after she moved back to the Lower 48.
And although Kelsea says Hollow Out is comprised of
neither the darkest nor the angriest of the poems from
the years she spent “up there”—those, she says, will
stay in the drawer—the collection is nevertheless a
heart wrenching journey of loneliness. Faced on the
page with an unending white where goggles are
necessary, splashes of coffee freeze in the air, and
blizzards hit in April, it is impossible to imagine
landscapes and broken relationships ravaged worse
than those Kelsea renders in Hollow Out.
Mary Huyck Mulka: You have said that Hollow Out
“chronicles a descent into hopelessness” but that “by
the end, it celebrates a tentative and tenuous
reclaiming of something that might resemble hope.”
Do you consider yourself a hopeful person?
Kelsea Habecker: Now I do. I certainly wasn’t at the
time when I was writing most of this poetry. I thought
that pessimism was more intellectually honest and
realistic, but it was emotionally and psychologically
devastating to approach the world that way. My return
to hopefulness started when I was writing these
poems, and then it happened more fully as I was
working on my second book about Alaska, which is
nonfiction. But I don’t think I can say which approach—
optimism or pessimism—is more honest or more
authentic. For me, it simply came down to a matter of
which approach allowed me to feel more possibilities,
greater faith or deeper fulfillment in life. Hopefulness,
which is still often a willful choice more than an innate
instinct, has become the clear choice for me.
MHM: I would think it takes quite a bit of hope to even
consider embarking into the Arctic. What compelled
you to become a teacher in Alaska?
KH: After college (at Randolph-Macon Woman’s
College for a B.A. in English and Spanish, and
Lynchburg College for teaching credentials), I wanted
to live in a place where I was a minority, where I would
be pushed outside my comfort zone, and where I
would be intensely challenged. I had envisioned myself
in a jungle somewhere or living in a grass hut, but I
ended up getting offered a job in this tiny little village
in the
Arctic Circle. At first, when everything was falling into
place and it was looking like Alaska was going to be the
best place for me to go, I was disappointed; I had
wanted to go abroad. But the village where I was is so
remote and isolated, that even though it’s a part of the
United States, it felt much more cross-cultural than,
say, living in a big cosmopolitan city in Europe. Even
though Alaska wasn’t remotely where I thought I’d ever
end up, I found that the ice, snow, storms and austere
beauty of that environment were incredibly inspiring,
and in many ways metaphoric for my life and
experiences. I suppose if I’d ended up building wells in
the desert, I probably would have found the same
metaphoric value, but the arctic ended up being a
really rich environment for me to be in.
MHM: Why did you stay for so long?
KH: I had a yearly contract, and I kept renewing it,
probably for longer than I should have. I was burnt out
by the end and should have left early. Maybe that was
the part of me that kept trying to be hopeful. Even as I
was dealing with all the student suicides and
everything else, every year when it came time to sign
on again, I’d sign, hoping that the next year could be
better.
MHM: You dig into difficult moments incredibly
candidly in this collection, including the problem of
teen suicide in your village. In “Jewel Box,” you write:
“Last night a young girl / pulled a string of robberies, /
stealing only jewelry, / cheap pieces to beautify her life.
/ Later she swallowed a string of pills.” What were your
intentions in broaching such painful subjects?
KH: I don’t know that I had intentions. The poems are
so rooted in my immediate experiences during those
years (1999 – 2004), that those topics were just a
natural—or unnatural, given what they were—offshoot
of dealing with different situations. The poems in
Hollow Out represent specific moments where I was
struggling to come to terms in a formal, structural or
aesthetic way when a dilemma or grief was too large
and too overwhelming for me to approach in any other
way. But I do think people should be aware of what’s
going on up there. There are a lot of issues up there
that should be addressed more widely. I had an
impulse to help with that.
Cut, Then Chase
It is spring and light
again takes up residence
69
in this frozen curve of earth.
Sea ice, passed through
December’s dark
and the dim sunrise of February,
is now piled in violent slabs
against the shore.
The men front axes.
To cut to the raw
exposed face of the spring ocean
they splinter and hitch away
the clutches of ice, carve
a road out of drifts and fragments
to the lead of opening water.
The long days finally stretch the miles
out to sea, like a river running
up ice, the way
cleared to pass, to haul boats
and set in once again to chase the whales,
oh my life, that rise to the surface.
MHM: You don’t delve into any large-scale ecological
or economic issues directly in Hollow Out, including
global warming and the debate whether to start
drilling Arctic oil fields discovered under receding ice.
How were these broader issues impacting the lives of
the Inupiat people in your village?
KH: The community where I was wasn’t opposed to
opening new oil fields, but it was concerned that the
end of oil up there is in sight. There’s a lot of anxiety
about the end of Alaskan oil, but global warming is by
far the biggest issue, and it’s not a hypothetical or
future issue. It’s real, obvious and happening quickly.
The media says the effects are more amplified the
further north that you go, and it’s true. Every year that I
was in Alaska the sea ice arrived later in the fall and
melted sooner in the spring. I think that that reality
played a role in the hopelessness that I developed up
there, because what is still just sound bites down here
in the lower 48 is really visibly happening up there. The
elders in the community where I lived are extremely
worried. Their whole way of life is threatened, and the
habitat of the animals that they depend on is
disappearing. They’ve lost so much already in terms of
culture and societal autonomy that confronting the
loss of their environment… to say it’s adding insult to
injury is an understatement. It’s just catastrophic.
MHM: Do you believe poetry is a viable avenue
through which to change these situations?
KH: This is a chance for me to be hopeful and
optimistic. I’d like to say yes. I think poetry is incredibly
powerful and provocative, and it certainly has lots of
possibilities. But I think our culture is largely
unprepared to reckon with poetry seriously enough for
it to wield as much power as it could. Even though I
had touched on the subjects through poetry first, when
I left Alaska and was compelled to do more to expose
the issues up there, I felt I needed to do it in prose, in
nonfiction form. I feel like a traitor saying this because
I’m a poet first and a prose writer second, but prose in
our culture today simply has more potential to reach
more people. More people are open to it.
MHM: That is a huge understatement.
KH: I’m trying to be diplomatic.
MHM: What do you hope this book will achieve?
KH: I think most people tend to think of the Arctic as a
blank—a great big void on top of the earth. I think
that’s partly why it took global warming so long to
make it into our active consciousness. If it were
happening somewhere “more important,” then maybe
we would have paid attention sooner. I hope this book
will give people an expanded image of the Arctic. It’s
dark in some ways, but vibrant and abundant in others.
MHM: Do you still feel an intense connection with your
village and its people?
KH: It has faded—I feel it. For the first couple of years
after I left, whenever I’d watch anything that was set in
Alaska, I’d get overwhelmed. I was watching
Salmonberries (Pelemele Film, 1991), starring k.d. lang
as an outsider living in an Eskimo village. I just started
sobbing. It was so evocative of the place where I’d
spent so much time. My dog started howling; she
heard huskies in the background of the film, and she
just went nuts. But I do still feel strongly connected and
think I always will. That’s partly why it’s so hard to know
that the environmental destruction up there is so
severe.
MHM: Criminal charges brought against hunters in
Point Hope for “wasting” caribou while hunting
recently brought the tensions between the Inupiat
people and “outsiders” into the media spotlight. Do
you have any insight into this issue as an “outsider”
who has worked closely with the Inupiat?
KH: I’m not sure I want to venture too deeply into the
waters of this one, actually. I know so little about the
specific event. I read a bit about it online and had
mixed emotions as I did. I’d want to go deeper and try
to understand the motivations for the actions—of both
70
sides (the hunters and the agency officials and media
who are running with the story). I just know how easy it
is to make a sweeping judgment about something, and
I don’t want to do that. Those types of judgments have
been flying between the white culture and the Alaska
Native culture for over a century.
I do know that when I was in the village, the elders
were worried about the fact that many young people
didn’t seem to be interested in learning or adhering to
the traditions that had guided the culture for centuries.
This clearly seems to be at the heart of this recent news
item, and it is another instance of the great death that
is still occurring up there. I feel sadness over that. I
cringe at the thought of heedless slaughter. And yet I
know I’m culpable of extravagant waste in my own life.
Even though I try to live simply and carefully, the
infrastructure it takes to sustain my daily living in a
large city is, I’m sure, far more wasteful of natural
resources than the drastically simpler lifestyles of the
community in Point Hope. So, even if there was
heedless waste, who am I to judge or condemn that? It
gets messy. I’m not saying I support what seems to
have happened—if it indeed did happen—I’m just
saying that there could be a whole lot of the pot calling
the kettle black. It’s so easy to lob blame around. It’s so
hard to choose compassion as a first response rather
than condemnation.
MHM: You’ve mentioned that you’d like to send copies
of Hollow Out to the village where you were teaching,
despite the fact that you’ve—often angrily—exposed
some real families’ secrets. In “Parent-Teacher
Conference,” you write, “‘Tillie says her uncles sleep in
her bed with her,’ I / want to say. I want my words to fly
toward her, peck at her bosom.” Are you worried at all
about how the community will respond to its
portrayal?
KH: I’m a bit worried. The Inupiat are very sensitive to
how their culture is portrayed, and because I didn’t shy
away from dealing with some of the more challenging
realities of life up there, it could be upsetting. I think
about that a lot, actually. It was a prime issue when I
was writing—how will this effect them? I don’t mean to
sound like I’m presuming that my little book will have
any major impact on anybody, but I do worry how it is
going to make them feel that I’ve represented them in
this way. It makes me nervous. I think it would be
different if I were still there and able to have
conversations and dialogue about the book instead of
sending it from afar. I hope that, despite the definite
darkness, there are also glimpses of the beauty up
there, both in the landscape and in the culture, and an
underlying sense of my deep attachment to that place.
The kind of pain and psychological darkness I
experienced during those years can only be
experienced by someone who cares deeply about the
place, the people, and the community. I really did love
the village in so many ways, but those don’t come into
focus as clearly in this collection. I focus on them much
more in my next book (of prose).
MHM: You’re yet to do a Hollow Out reading in Alaska.
Does that have anything to do with the cultural
tightrope you walk in some of the poems about the
Inupiat?
At the End of a Hard Day
They’re hauling a car off the ice tonight
after loosening the driver’s frozen hands
from the steering wheel and packing his
body
onto a plane to the nearest coroner
several hundred miles away.
But this evening
doesn’t want to be about loosening
fingers or chronicling calamity.
After a few too many sorrows
the solid ocean looks like the widest
highway
you’ve ever driven and no tomorrows
to stop you.
This evening wants to feel
a softness around the edges, a fraying.
Something like a detour that weaves
out and in but never arrives
with any point to make.
Please, it wants to say, don’t
feel this. Just let it ride.
KH: In April, I visited Alaska for the first time since
moving from the state five years ago. I was really happy
to be back, and being in that landscape once again
evoked a lot of creative energy in me. I didn’t get to the
village on that trip, however. I tried to arrange a
reading when I was up there in April, but the stars
didn’t align for that. I actually feel less like a cultural
tightrope walker than I have in the past. I know that a
lot of what I’ve written about the village and the
community I lived amongst was bleak or harsh, but it
really does all stem from a feeling of great solidarity
with the community. As I said earlier, I wouldn’t have
grieved as hard as I did if I hadn’t loved as much as I
did. The great devastation I felt was founded upon the
great tenderness I felt toward that community. I think I
have more trust now than I used to that that
71
tenderness comes through in my writing. It does in my
more recent writing, at least.
MHM: Do you still keep in close touch with anyone?
KH: I do. I taught little ones who have long forgotten
me, but in an attempt to make a small impact against
the problem of teen suicide, I started working with
older students as the leader of a peer-counseling
group, and I still keep in touch with some of them.
They’re the students that influenced me the most;
they’re the ones that taught me about strength and
resiliency, and ultimately, hope. But because it’s not a
place that I can visit easily, the continuity in
relationships hasn’t been there as much as I’d like it to
be. It is a 4-hour flight on a bush plane from
Anchorage, and there are no roads connecting the
village to anywhere else. It is very remote.
MHM: You develop that isolation thoroughly,
particularly through the landscape, from the “green
braids of the night sky” to the “cold blue world of ice /
slowly moving toward us.” Is there anything you left
out?
KH: Yeah. I never spent much time there in the
summer. As a teacher, I was free during the summer, so
I hightailed it out as quickly as I could. I think there’s a
whole other dynamic, ecosystem and environment
that happens in the summer, when it’s constantly
daylight and relatively warmer. My book doesn’t really
evoke that mood, but I captured the experience of the
environment that I had up there. It really did play an
enormous role in my life; the spaciousness and degree
of austerity, and the severity, changed me. I hope my
reverence and appreciation of that shows in my poems.
MHM: Because the landscape you painted was so
austere, I was surprised when recognizable landmarks
appeared, like the Korean restaurant. Where you
surprised, too?
KH: I was happy to see familiar things when I got up
there—a restaurant, a store, a laundromat. I remember
feeling really happy to see a red truck driving down the
road, that there was something that looked familiar.
What surprised me was the actual physical
environment. It’s so startlingly different—there are no
trees, no tall buildings. There’s nothing to block your
view to the horizon anywhere. As much as I’d read
about what it was going to be like, you can’t really
wrap your mind around it until you’re there. You sign
your contract to teach at a job fair in Anchorage, so you
have to commit without ever seeing the village. There
are stories about teachers who fly in, stick their head
out the airplane door, turn around, get right back in
their seat, and renege on the contract.
MHM: When you touched down in the village for the
first time, did it cross your mind to stay in the plane?
KH: No. I was excited. I’d been in Anchorage for a few
weeks shopping for supplies, and I thought I’d dressed
warmly, with several layers of fleece, neoprene and
Gortex. I got off the plane in the Arctic, and the wind
just pummeled me and it was sleeting, and I remember
thinking, oh, my God, this is August. I was freezing. It
didn’t occur to me not to stay, but I had no idea what
I’d gotten myself into. The principal was on the airstrip
to meet me and the other new teachers, and he said,
“Welcome to the Arctic.” I thought, yes, this is the
adventure I wanted.
Usually when you go to a new place, you feel a little
uncomfortable and unsettled at first, and then become
more comfortable as time goes by. I had the exact
opposite. It was definitely strange the first few weeks—
it was still daylight all the time, so there was absolutely
some adjusting to do—but I loved it. I really thought
that I’d found this little utopia where everybody knew
each other and I could walk everywhere I needed to go.
I loved knowing that people would recognize and talk
to each other in the post office. I even loved the harsh
environment. I remember being so excited the first
time there was a real blizzard, and my house was just
shaking in the wind. I loved feeling like I was at the
mercy of the natural world. That kind of exposure and
vulnerability made me feel more alive. But it definitely
faded. It became harder for me as I became closer to
the community and developed more friendships, as
students started opening up about some of the bleaker
things that were going on at home, and as I
understood more of the grief from chronic
unemployment, the loss of their identity as a culture,
and everything else that their parents were dealing
with. It wasn’t that I got tired of or burned out on the
cold, the weather, or isolation so much as it was that
the social issues became so difficult to deal with. These
poems were written late in my time up there, and so
they’re more reflective of that growing sense of dis-
ease rather than the earlier happy days when I thought
I could stay there forever.
MHM: What exactly appealed to you so much about
the lifestyle up there?
72
KH: One of the things that was so amazing up there
was the amount of time that I had. I could walk
everywhere I needed to go. At the end of each
summer, before returning to the village for the school
year, I’d spend three days in Anchorage shopping for
the groceries and supplies I’d need during the next
nine months in the village, so there weren’t errands to
run. I’d get home at 4 o’clock after teaching and have
nowhere to go, nothing to do until the next morning
when it was time to go back to school again. Weekends
were wide-open space, too—I didn’t have to go to the
bank, the grocery store, the gas station, anywhere. The
downside was there were no theaters or bookstores or
other entertaining distractions, but I remember feeling
like I could just sit at my window and watch the snow
falling, completely snug and comfortable in my house.
I felt at ease, that I had time and space to savor the
experience up there. At first, when everything was
happy and great, that was a real luxury.
MHM: Clearly, the luxury of time like that is one any
poet would envy. While you did earn your MFA from
the Bennington College Writing Seminars program
during your years in Alaska, had you expected your
time up there to serve as material?
KH: Poetry for me often springs from a strong sense of
a physical location, so when I moved to the Arctic, I
thought, OK, this place is so unique and evocative that if I
can’t come up with some decent poetry up here, I’m really
in trouble. I wanted to leave Alaska with a body of
poetry that evoked that place for me. On that level, I
feel like I have accomplished what I set out to.
MHM: Has your perspective on Alaska or the subject
matter of the poems in Hollow Out changed since the
book was published?
KH: I’ve softened. The grief I felt when I lived in the
village has healed. I still feel grief, but it’s less visceral.
The despair is gone; it’s replaced with a strong
motivation to stay connected, to stay involved, to keep
telling about my experiences, to keep sharing the
stories. Any blame that I felt—toward others and most
of all toward myself—over not being able to handle
things differently, is long gone. And now when I talk
about the village, I hope what comes through is the
love for it. Now that the anger is gone, the love is what
remains. I love that village. It’s a constant presence in
my life, even if only through my own psyche. My
favorite image of the village is when I would fly back
into it in winter, and after flying over hundreds of miles
of ice, I’d finally see up ahead of me a tiny grid of light,
surrounded by vast expanses of snow and darkness.
The village glowed. I love that image, and it’s the one I
turn back to most often. It’s a beacon.
Most of my writing is still predominantly focused on
the Arctic. Of course I’ve picked up some new topics
based on life experiences since leaving there. I spent
the last year working closely with a group of women
living on the former municipal dump in Juarez, Mexico,
and I’m beginning to do some writing about them. But
the majority of my creative energy is still homing
toward the Arctic. I’m tunneling through a narrative
nonfiction book, a sort of memoir, about those years,
but I’m finding that really slow-going. In the midst of
that, I’m writing a screenplay about the village. That’s
coming along nicely and I’m quite enthused about it.
I’m also scheming up creative projects that could allow
me to go back up to the village to work with the
community again, though for a shorter duration than
my last stint up there. I’m fantasizing right now about
doing a documentary film project with the older
students, and I’m working toward that by collaborating
with a nonprofit organization, The Viewfinder Project,
that does that type of work. We’ll see how it all pans
out.
MHM: So you haven’t met your limits of snow?
KH: I grew up in Michigan, so I love snow. That’s part of
what drew me to the Arctic, but I used up almost all my
tolerance for snow in those five years. I am definitely
more inclined now to the warm and sunny—the
opposite extremes. I still love winter, though. I
wouldn’t want to live long term in a place that didn’t
have four distinct seasons, but I like winter to start two
weeks before Thanksgiving and end right after New
Year’s.
MHM: Do you think you’ll ever revisit the Alaskan
landscape through poetry again?
So Now Then
In August the barge arrives
like a carnival of plenty
and is anchored off shore
a week while supplies—
flour barrels and dried beans,
canned peaches, boxes of books—
are unloaded.
The barge’s departure marks
summer’s sudden end. All that remains
in the year is winter
and its slow steady elegy.
73
Because I want
to make my life
a barge
of particular moments
heavy and floating,
I will remember this one:
my husband asleep in the next room, the new pup on
my lap
and the attentive
sun of late Arctic summer
turning it all,
gravel and grass alike,
to gold.
KH: I haven’t written a poem about Alaska since I left…
though images from the Arctic definitely still appear in
my poetry. My more recent poems are no longer
exclusively focused on that landscape, but the deep
effects that place had on me will be with me—and in
my work—for a long time.
Kelsea Habecker is currently an adjunct instructor at
Empire State College, writing tutor, and freelance editor
and writer. She lives in Wheaton, IL.
Mary Huyck Mulka is an editor, teacher and student in
Fargo, N.D
74
Contributors:
Alexandra Appel: Alexandra Ellen Appel's work has appeared most
recently in Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment,
University of Alaska Press, 2008 and PenHouse Inc. Vol.5, 2007. She
has yo-yoed back and forth between Alaska and northern California,
but her heart always remains in Alaska.
John M. Baalke: John M. Baalke lives part-time in Seattle, WA, and
part-time in Pedro Bay, AK where he works as village administrator.
He has writing forthcoming in Web Del Sol Review of Books.
Scott Banks: Scott Banks lives in Anchorage. His poem “I Wore
Cowboy Boots to Work Today” was the runner up in the 2009 Harold
McCracken Endowment Poetry Contest. His essay "Rink Rat" will
appear in the anthology Cold Flashes to be published by the
University of Alaska Press.
Marilyn Borell: Marilyn Borell has an MFA degree in poetry from the
University of Alaska Anchorage where she is employed as Academic
Coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences. Her poems have
appeared in the Anchorage Daily News and the anthology North of
Eden.
Marion Boyer: Marion Boyer's poetry and essays have been widely
published. Green, Boyer's collection of poems, was published by
Finishing Line Press in 2003 and her newest book, The Clock of the
Long Now (Mayapple Press) is a nominee for the 2009 Pushcart Prize.
Randol Bruns: Randol Bruns came to Alaska to canoe down the
Yukon River. He built a cabin on the Talkeetna River and has taught
in Yup'ik Eskimo communities on the Lower Yukon. He is currently
building a house on the Little-Susitna River. His poems have been
published in Ice-Floe..
Vic Cavalli: Vic Cavalli’s poetry, short fiction, and visual art have been
published in various literary journals in North America, England,
Australia, and New Zealand. He is currently living in the mountains of
Mission, BC.
Marjorie Kowalski Cole: Marjorie Kowalski Cole, from Ester, AK, is
the author of two novels, Correcting the Landscape (which won the
2004 Bellwether Award) and the forthcoming A Spell on the Water,
and a book of poems, Inside, Outside, Morningside. Her work has
appeared in numerous journals including Grain, Antigonish Review,
Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Room of One’s Own, and
the Seattle Review.
Michael Earl Craig: Michael Earl Craig is the author of Can You Relax
in My House (Fence Books, 2002) and Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006).
A new book of poems will be published by Wave Books in 2010. He
lives near Livingston, Montana where he shoes horses for a living.
Gretchen Diemer: Gretchen Diemer studied at the University of
Montana and completed an MFA and teacher certification program
at the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1994 she was hired to
teach in the Alaskan village of Noorvik, followed by positions on St.
Paul Island in the Pribilofs. Her poems have appeared in Ice-Floe,
Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, Fine Madness, and Cutbank. Her
poetry collection Between Fire and Water, Ice and Sky was published
by NorthShore Press in 2008. She lives outside of Wasilla, AK.
Ann Dixon: Ann Dixon lives in Willow, AK where she works as a school
librarian. She has written nine books, as well as poetry, for children. Her
poems for adults have appeared in Ice Floe and the anthology
Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment..
Sherry Eckrich: Sherry Eckrich holds an MFA from the University of
Alaska Anchorage. Her poems and essays have appeared in the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, 50 Poems for Alaska, and several small journals.
Carolyn Edelman: Carolyn Edelman is a longtime Alaskan who currently
lives in the Southeast Alaska community of Gustavus. She publishes the
Fairweather Reporter, a monthly community newspaper.
Jeff Fair: Alaskan author and field biologist Jeff Fair is currently writing a
biography of Larry Aumiller’s thirty years as manager and bear-
interpreter at the McNeil River Sanctuary. In 2007 Fair received a National
Press Club award for his story about Aumiller and McNeil in Audubon
magazine.
Erling Friis-Baastad: Erling Friis-Baastad’s poetry collections include The
Exile House (Salmon Publishing, Ireland) and Wood Spoken: New and
Selected Poems (Northbound Press/Harbour Publishing, British
Columbia). He works as an editor with the Yukon News in Whitehorse.
Jo Going: Jo Going writes and paints her way around the circumpolar
north. Most of her imagery is based in her life in the wilderness of interior
Alaska.
Rebecca Goodrich: In 1994, Rebecca Goodrich left California's glitter for
a houseboat in Dutch Harbor. She's been a bookseller, a journalist, and
won some writing awards. Now in Anchorage, she's active in Alaska’s
dynamic literary arts community.
Kelsea Habecker: Kelsea Habecker is a poet and writer. In 2009, her
book, Hollow Out, was nominated for a PEN Literary Award and the
Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry. She was a finalist for the
2003 Ruth Lilly Fellowship in poetry and received the 2002 John Haines
poetry award. She received her MFA in poetry from Bennington Writing
Seminars and her BA from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. She
currently lives in Indianapolis, where she teaches graduate creative
writing seminars, undergraduate art courses, and is working on
nonfiction and a screenplay about Alaska.
Ernestine Hayes: Currently assistant professor of English at the
University of Alaska Southeast, Ernestine Hayes is a Kaagwaantaan
woman of the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska. Her book, Blonde
Indian, an Alaska Native Memoir (University of Arizona Press, 2006), was
an American Book Award recipient and a finalist for the Pacific Rim
Kiriyama prize and for the PEN nonfiction award.
Eric Heyne: Eric Heyne has been teaching English at the University of
Alaska Fairbanks since 1986. He is the editor of two special literary issues
of the Canadian journal The Northern Review, and has published poetry in
Ice-Floe, Alaska Quarterly Review, Big Tex[t], and Eclectica.
Robin Hiersche: Robin Hiersche currently lives in migration between a
village in Alaska (her home of 27 years) and a village south of the
border. Service, creative energy in any form, and the transitions and
connections between them are her life's work.
Sean Patrick Hill: Sean Patrick Hill graduated with an MA in Writing
from Portland State University. His poems appear or are forthcoming in
Hayden's Ferry Review, Exquisite Corpse, Willow Springs, RealPoetik, New
York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, and Quarter After Eight. His first book, The
Imagined Field, will be published in 2010 by Paper Kite Press.
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B. Hutton: B. Hutton first discovered written language in the Sunday
“funnies” in the mid-20th century on a cloudy
industrial grey morning in Detroit, Michigan. He is still working on his
own collection of thought balloons.
Rick James: Rick James grew up and has lived on Canada's West
Coast all his life. He has worked at various jobs from commercial
fisherman, smelter worker and tree planter. He finally went back to
school at mid-life and is currently an unemployed field archaeologist.
In his spare time he researches and writes about West Coast maritime
history. James attempts to document old car junkyards.
Joan Kane: Joan Kane is Inupiaq Eskimo, with family from King Island
and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She earned her bachelor’s degree from
Harvard College and received her MFA in writing from Columbia
University. Kane received the John Haines Award from Ice Floe Press
in 2004. In 2009, she was selected as a finalist for the Ruth Lilly
Fellowship and was named a Whiting Writers’ Award Winner. Her first
book of poetry, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, was published by
NorthShore Press in 2009. She lives in Anchorage, AK with her
husband and son.
Susheila Khera: Susheila Khera works as a technical writer and lives
in Fairbanks, Alaska. Her work has appeared in Ice-Floe, Inside
Passages, Catamaran and WoodenBoat Magazine.
Sandra Kleven: Sandra Kleven’s writing has appeared in Alaska
Quarterly Review, Oklahoma Review and Topic Magazine (NYC). She is
the author or The Right Touch: A Read-aloud Story to Help Prevent Child
Sexual Abuse. “Jaden is Calling” won 1st Place in nonfiction in the
2008 Anchorage Daily News/UAA Creative Writing Contest.
Amy Otto Larsen: Amy lives with four cats, one dog and one
husband in an underground house in Wasilla, Alaska. In her free time,
she works as a Platting Technician for the Matanuska-Susitna
Borough. On summer weekends, she rides madly around Alaska on a
Harley-Davidson Electra Glide Classic with her husband as chauffeur.
Deb Liggett: Deb Liggett is an essayist and poet. A Denver native,
Deb Liggett spent much of her professional career with the National
Park Service. Since retiring in 2005, Liggett lives with her husband,
Jay in Anchorage. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage, High Country
News, Indian Country Today, the Casper Star-Tribune and the 2008
anthology 50 Poems for Alaska.
Janet Levin: Janet Levin gave away her snow shovel before she
realized she wouldn't be leaving Alaska for good. She picked up a
camera a year ago following years of resistance no therapy could
alter. Her poetry's been published in Ice-Floe and various other
journals. For many years she produced KSKA's Alaska Reader
program, and worked with homeless families via Anchorage School
District's Child in Transition/ Homeless Project. She lives half the year
in a coastal Mexican village.
Nancy Lord: Nancy Lord, Alaska's Writer Laureate for 2008-10, is the
author of three short fiction collections (most recently The Man Who
Swam with Beavers, Coffee House Press, 2001) and three books of
literary nonfiction. Her most recent book is a collection of
essays/memoir, Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life, published by the
University of Nebraska Press. "At Sea," her first play, was included in
the Play Lab at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, AK in
2005 and presented on stage there the following year.
Marie Lundstrom: Retired librarian and teacher Marie Lundstrom
has published articles in Alaska Women Speak, Capital Times
(Madison, WI), and Cambridge (WI) News, and had some poems in
Inklings and Understory at UAA. She currently works part-time as an
editor of National Guard magazine articles. Her poems appeared in the
2008 anthology 50 Poems for Alaska.
Jason Marvel: Jason Marvel teaches English at Palmer High School and
lives in Wasilla, AK. He received his MFA in poetry through National
University in 2007, has been published in GNU and is one of 150
Freedom Writer teachers whose stories are featured in Teaching Hope:
Stories from the Freedom Writer Teachers (Broadway Books, August 2009).
David McElroy: McElroy’s poems have appeared in many national
journals and anthologies. A book of his poetry, Making It Simple, was
published by Ecco Press in 1975. He lives in Anchorage and works as a
professional pilot in the Arctic.
Buffy McKay: Buffy McKay has been published in the Anchorage Daily
News, Anchorage Press, the 2008 anthology Crosscurrents North, and
Explorations. She won the 2008 Anchorage Daily News Editor’s Choice
Award for her poem “How Spring Travels in Alaska.” and has received
scholarships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Key
West Literary. Her poems have appeared in the 2008 anthology 50
Poems for Alaska, and Buffy's personal mission is "to see the world in as
many ways as possible," and this includes living in Anchorage.
Rachel Mehl: Rachel Mehl lives in Bellingham, WA. She has an MFA from
University of Oregon. Her poems have most recently appeared Alaska
Quarterly Review, Portland Review, and Willow Springs and her manuscript
Why I Hate Horses was a finalist for the 2009 Snake Nation Poetry Prize.
John Morgan: John Morgan moved to Fairbanks in 1976 to teach
creative writing at UAF. He has three collections of poetry, The Bone-
Duster, The Arctic Herd, and Walking Past Midnight. His work has appeared
in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Alaska
Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner. His new book, Spear-Fishing on
the Chatanika: New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Salmon
Poetry.
Mary Huyck Mulka: A former TV news producer, Mary Huyck Mulka now
writes, edits and teaches in Fargo, N.D. Recent poems can be found in
PANK Magazine and Blood Lotus, and her first chapbook, Tacklebox, co-
authored by Julie Walnum, was released by Spooky Girlfriend Press in
November 2009.
Mark Muro: Mark is a poet, playwright and performer who has been
seen on and off stage in Anchorage for the past twenty years in a variety
of roles, most notably as "himself" in his own one-person shows:
“Dingoes on Velvet,” “Saint Alban's,” “Love, Sex and All That Comes
Between,” and “Apocalypse When I Get Around To It,” opening soon at
Out North Theater in Anchorage. As a winner of the Alaska State Poetry
Slam competition in 2001, Mark represented the state in national
competition.
N. Q. Nguyen: N.Q. Nguyen is a multimedia artist who enjoys writing,
filmmaking, painting, and photography.
Debbie Nigro: Debbie Nigro has called Fairbanks, AK home since 1982
and is privileged to have studied birds, mostly north of 68 degrees north
latitude since 1989.
Doug Pope: Doug Pope is a writer living in Anchorage and Hope with
his wife, Beth. His first poem, “Enigma,” was published in 1962 in The
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner when he was 17.
Peter Porco: Peter Porco is an Anchorage-based writer and former
newspaper reporter whose play "Wind Blown and Dripping," about
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Dashiell's Hammett's years in the Aleutians during World War II,
opened at Cyrano's Off-Center Playhouse in Anchorage in January
2009.
Pamela Porter: Pamela Porter won the 2005 Governor General's
Award for her verse novel, The Crazy Man. She lives on Vancouver
Island, Canada, with her family and a menagerie of rescued horses,
dogs and cats.
Cinthia Ritchie: Cinthia Ritchie lives in Alaska where she works as a
journalist to support her poetry habit. Her poetry and prose can be
found in New York Magazine, Water-Stone Review, Under the Sun,
Rainbow Curve, Ice Floe, Gin Bender Poetry Review, and Wicked Alice.
Her essay, "Pig Road," won a grand prize at Memoir magazine and
received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2006.
Bill Sherwonit: Anchorage nature writer Bill Sherwonit is the author
of 12 books. His newest is Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in
Alaska's Arctic Wilderness, published in fall 2009 by the University of
Alaska Press.
Jim Sweeney: James P. Sweeney writes short stories, poems and is
currently writing his first book. His stories and poems have been
published in Alpinist Magazine, The Anchorage Press, and The
Anchorage Daily News. He lives in Hope, Alaska with his dog Alute.
Kathleen Tarr: Kathleen Tarr received her MFA in creative nonfiction
from the University of Pittsburgh. She works as the Program
Coordinator of UAA’s Low-Residency MFA Program and teaches
creative writing at UAA. Her work has appeared in Creative
Nonfiction, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Airlines Magazine, and is
forthcoming in Cold Flashes: Literary Snapshots of Alaska. “The souls
like water, will find a place to go” is her first published poem.
Steve Taylor: Steve Taylor lives in Oakdale, CA with his wife, kids,
and The World's Greatest Labrador Retriever, working as a therapist
to support his hunting and fishing habits.
Stephen Delos Treacy: Stephen Delos Treacy led 17 fall whale
migration surveys over the Beaufort Sea before moving to Port
Townsend, WA. His poems have appeared in Ice-Floe and one
appeared on a Borealis Brewery beer label. His play, Winter Bird, set in
Alaska, won an Honorable Mention in Virtual Theatre Project’s 2008-
2009 "Pen Is a Mighty Sword" playwriting competition.
Russ Van Paepeghem: Russ Van Paepegham holds an MFA in
creative nonfiction from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His
writing has appeared or is forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly,
Camas, and Antipodes. He lives and writes in Missoula, Montana.
Jon Wesick: Jon Wesick has a Ph.D. in physics and has published
close to two hundred poems in small press journals such as Pearl,
Pudding, and Slipstream. Two of his chapbooks have taken honorable
mentions in the San Diego Book Awards. His poem, “Bread and
Circuses,” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers
and Artists contest.
Paul Winkel: Paul Winkel is a retired engineer who wonders what he
will do when he grows up. His poems appeared in the 2008
anthology 50 Poems for Alaska .
Tonja Woelber: Tonja Woelber is a gardener and fisherman and
spends as much time as possible outdoors. Her poem “After Wang
Wei” received 1st Place in the Anchorage Daily News Creative Writing
contest in 1992. Her series of haiku poems entitled “Raven Greets Spring”
was performed by the Anchorage Symphony Orchestra in February 2002.
Her poems appeared in the 2008 anthology 50 Poems for Alaska.
Nancy Woods: Nancy Woods was born and raised in Central Alaska,
where her family had a cabin on Harding Lake. She now lives in Portland,
OR, where she edits a community newspaper and works as a writing
instructor/coach.
How to Submit to
CirqueCirqueCirqueCirque
Cirque, published in Anchorage, Alaska, is a regional
journal created to share the best writing in the region with
the rest of the world.
This regional literary journal invites emerging and
established writers living in the North Pacific Rim—Alaska,
Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Hawaii, Yukon
Territory, Alberta, and British Columbia—to submit short
stories, poems, creative nonfiction, translations, plays,
reviews of first books, interviews, photographs, and
artwork for Cirque’s Summer Solstice 2010 Issue.
Issue #2--Summer Solstice 2010 Submission Deadline:
April 30, 2010
Submission Guidelines:
--Please send your best work and a brief bio.
--Prose, no more than 10 pages; 2-4 poems; artwork,
photos in JPEG.
--Electronic submissions only
--please attach a Word document to email; use 12pt font
in a common, easy to read typeface (Times, Arial, etc.)
--title your email "poetry submission," "fiction
submission," "play submission," "non-fiction submission,"
etc., otherwise it will go into SPAM
Submissions will be recycled.
Send Inquiries and Electronic Submissions Only to:
Replies average two to three months
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