dg nanouk okpik

Drum

for Feather

As sparrow bore sand down
song clamored. Abstrusé:
black-leaf Russian tobacco;
felt through her/my fingers.
The sill of the window chipping,
opacity-shade, with rice-paper
blinds, newspapers with no dates.
Convulsing on the concrete,
our opaque, thick heart, expels—
the darting demon sick; embodied
in my baptized breasts—
exorcise me, where 4 valves
blood-a-beat.

Thrush’s Melody

The unnumbered
sailing stones of Death Valley
thrush’s melody beat her/my skin with increased throb.
Thrice bitten by a sand flea storm,
could never stop the throes
of convulsions as today’s exoplanet.
She/I unwoven as we enter the north
and south pole transpiring-in-zone.
Our mind became flight!
She/I of double women shades,
with the song thrush’s melody,
wearing a double shroud
over the land of dead-eyed people
of no sound, a dimension of lyric pushing
the ridge of mental age—say of 428 light-years—
of sentient beings with a refined
conveyance of gesture. STOP. NO!
Not like that, but maybe. We join and conjoin
our inner selves in fire and skull.
No one else can twist the lever of how
it is. A thistle of wild cotton, that ignites
and goes rogue is a volcano with lava
map charts unfold the tectonic plates,
yield to sea light, sing thrush sing
for snow and twenty-five below.

Fuse

In I follow the Little People,
descending on stone steps:
a labyrinth ready to unfold
its thorns, blossoms, rugged roots.
I dwell in the mind of damper ground,
an investigation, a spell, in the 6,228 ft.
hole of methane. Listen to the thaw in the spongy
depths of a quantum multiverse; of silver
globules rising, in the air-lunged
permafrost—floating—floating above,
Little People on the backs of bowheads,
carrying a rusted steel box of olden tools.
Shasta daisies lend beauty to sedges
and moss cradles the Quonset hut.

razor cut flayed flesh
lies on the cold cement floor
of symbols fuse me

“Drum,” “Thrush’s Melody,” and “Fuse” are from Blood Snow. Copyright 2022 by dg nanouk okpik. Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

dg nanouk okpik was born in and spent much of her life in Anchorage, Alaska. She attended Salish Kootenai College, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award, the May Sarton Award, and an American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale. Her second book, Blood Snow, is recently available from Wave Books.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2022