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: cirquejournal@yahoo.com

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

cirquejournal@yahoo.com. 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

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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:

cirquejournal@yahoo.com

Replies average two to three months

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