A gray-black storm lies low, above the sea.A 78 mile per hour windchill shatters anywater into icebergs, as I drown in my own element.Rustling waves rolling me back to this massivebreakup outside and in. It glides past me blue-green,blue-turquoise, collisions of pinnacles and pressurepoints, which pinch. Volcano ash, radiation andchemo ruin the physical. Old frozen cliffs, hoarfrostlungs, clefts of monastic bergs adrift. I cough, coughup bowels of human limits of sanity, sounds of galewinds rifting the clapboard house I call home, as mylungs carry my brain; carry my heart, and innards,hands and feet; I hand palm the distance of sky and light. Cut Yukon salmon In my eyes, the river flows The scent of burnt birch
A Glacial Oil World
Feature Date
- January 29, 2023
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Copyright © 2022 by dg nanouk okpik.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
dg nanouk okpik was born and spent much of her life in Anchorage, Alaska. She graduated from Salish Kootenai College with an AFA in Liberal Arts and Liberal Studies, and later attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, graduating with an AFA and a BFA in Creative Writing before receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast College. okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Award, the May Sarton Award, and an American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012).
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