Green Linden Press

With a Hammer & Drill Bit & Pane of Glass

I walk along a shore of salt and search for a sky
for a sky

reflecting blue
all winter

though a mirror
as it melts

won’t show
what isn’t there

& metal clapper
on metal &

a lost photograph
of the ouroboros

circling the bright
days in Poltava

& elsewhere as she
crouched astride

a latrine                                                                       where
where the eggs                                                           (Gogol’s poppies?)

inscribed with lines
could empty nothing

in supplication
to the erased

faces of the figures
carted everywhere

from the steppes
& another translator                                                    in another translation

drunk with his many-
headed fire &

recalling the topple
and raze & afraid

of women armed
only with hand-turned

spoons, thatch, & our
children dreaming

of potency & releasing
all of us from poisons

& another day in Kharkiv
after the blizzarding

away, in the lobby
of a constructivist hotel

someone held Plath’s poppies,
asked what if                                                               it was what if

they unblinded
& could make me see

On No Longer Being a Carbon-offset Girlfriend

Inscribed with invisible language,
new with mar and garble I archive
nothing but atmosphere—

such music is dry and sharp
and all the darkness I have grasped
grows legible, either indifferent

or nothing like rivers of young ice
as they flash, dazzling blue-white.
Once, you made me envy you—

your glut confusion bruised
by every weapon or want
as cold tongues turned the land

for life, mixing richness into the soil
to raise one last thick forest
for cambium to gargle and soothe,

you struck root to brutalize and render
a girl into something domestic,
to consume to extinction, to leer

at hairgrass as it too loses its scale.
If I had never ceded continents,
how could I usher another

diminishment, another gesture
of change or repair in a dew-world
wet with gold or granite,

of carved earth thick with saplings
and the heal of fireweed and sorrel
rising from silted earth

churned by a composed,
deliberate might? Compulsion
thrives in a grid-girded world,

as if to scar my skull
anarchic on its ruined face.
What parsimony yet smothers

and bakes me as I erase
cities, submerge countries, drowning
the engines and braying machines

of empire, my gristle nothing
but abundance, my inner
rind familiar and serviceable

as you skin my throat and make
me bleed, as I funnel gas
into a skiff as if— as if at sea.

Don’t Run Out

real & white as snow
                                    have you forgotten
                                                                        starting over, & over

the swan crossing
                                    with the dark tide
                                                                        southward to the sound

not too far off
                                    firework & blast
                                                                        of something hard to reach

& harder to escape                           
                                    I remember how    
                                                                        without you
a woman’s quarrel

                                                                        it passes into a quarrel
                                                                        with no one

The Angel of Yelling

I wasn’t always this perfect.

On the drumlin burning
swords and munitions
will you waste?

Text me when you can be nice.

Resiliency exhausts me:
                                         don’t want to be metaphor anymore,
but drum, but map.

            I don’t know what you mean by that but don’t really care to find out, either.

How do you process information
       & also help people hear
what you literally saw? 

                                    I don’t think you should be allowed to date white people.

Plunder,
plunder,
plover.

It’s not your kids’ fault that their mother is an asshole.

The recollection
of such lost
abundance

It’s no fucking secret that every man in your life is abusive.

a provocation,
a way to speak
to myself.

                                                I’m sorry every man in your life is abusive, except me.

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak and Qawiaraq. Her most recent book is Dark Traffic (2021 Pitt Poetry Series). In 2023 she will have new collections of poetry and prose from Staircase Press and above/ground press. She is currently a visiting assistant professor and visiting poet at UMass Boston, and was the 2021 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism at Scripps College. She has recently taught in the departments of studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora and English at Tufts, and creative writing at Harvard and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She was a 2009 Whiting Award Winner, a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2019 Radcliffe Fellow, and a 2020–21 Mellon Practitioner Fellow at Brown’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race in America. Formerly a lifelong Alaskan, she has raised her children as a single mother in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 2019.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2022