UNCLE FOOT
skinsewing
lineage
traced to origin
musky
ugruk soles
tread lightly
across shorefast ice
silver
sealskin boot
unspoiled for
one thousand years
entombed
in shelf ice
on beaches of
black bluffs
camouflaged
in glacial resin
arctic
winds
lacerate
exposed remains
proof
that a stitch endures
A CARIBOU SKIN MASK
On
the beaches of Arey Island
I
picked the black stones,
the
pockets in my parka
sagged
with each step.
I
brought them to Aana
together
we ran our fingers
over
silkened flint
and
we sprouted white feathers.
She
remembered my face
in
the cheekbones of a mask,
I
watched her crown wolverine fur
to
the edges of beaver scraps.
She
told me to bite the thread,
and
a fiber of sinew got stuck.
I
tasted the salted oils,
my
mouth watered into the shape of a bill.
I
braided her hair in two
black
ropes and she wrapped
them
around her head
with
an ivory hairpin.
I
was named after her sister,
we
sat side by side as
she
told me stories
of
wild geese that married men.
THE NEGATIVE
I
watch as a negative transforms: he was named after the sound of water smacking
skin, shuddering after adrenaline steals his breath. He surfaces against black of bowhead. A harpoon waiting, poised
above a man in a white qatignisi.
Emergence. Silence broken with a
spray exhaled. A bloodmist—the last
breath. I flatten a photograph—yellowed
reconstructed fragments, edges flake with age and restored by hypnosis. The
jawbone of a whale supports squares of earth, in this sod house. His eyes are white, hands and feet
sinewbound. A smile revealing ghost
teeth, brown, disintegrating as song reverberates in thick moist air. He
travels to the origin of taboo, never leaving his body. The odor of thawed
tundra remains. A drop of sweat absorbs
into the mud as he evokes a spirit in shadows of a seal oil
lamp—possession. The only evidence a
quiver of heat as I hang my print, glossy, measuring ten feet by ten feet on a
wall of the museum and watch as men and women walk past, pause, and carefully
tilt their heads distilling meaning from underexposure
a
collision at the tip of a raven’s beak
bone
crushers
shell
fracturers
the blackest shade giving birth to copper
