Green Linden Press

In 2017, Green Linden Press began its chapbook series. Here are three poems from the next installment in that series, Vivian Faith Prescott’s Fat for Our Stories, forthcoming in 2024.

Species Report

Salmon have a long association with humans,
and the barnacle-spotted whale skin,

a seal’s head appearing and disappearing
beneath the gray wind-swept sea.

What species does not have special behaviors?
A humpback once slept beside

our anchored boat all night,
its breath in keeping with ours,

while the dark bay caught August’s falling stars.
I don’t know where porpoise sleep,

yet I know the purse sein, the gillnet and
the trolling net, are stacked and tarped

now for winter. If anything, I’d like to think
their habitat is my own lifeweb—

a reef, a rock, a bank of shore,
places where wild salmon sleep.

Yes, there are benchmarks and assessments to consider,
but somewhere the sea lice is feeding

on mucus, skin and blood, and the jellyfish
is renewing itself.

Unseasonal Like June

The possibility of a winter smoke
at our fishcamp draws us
from our cabin to the smokehouse
tucked in beside a yellow shipping container.

We take advantage of an unusual,
warm wet day in February
and guests from Australia
are visiting. We start a small smoky fire

in the smokehouse and smoke out
sleeping spiders.
We chop and slice and brine
king salmon like it was June.

And I think of my aging father,
just last week, in his winter-self,
jumped into a neighbors’
sinking skiff in the harbor,

a boat stall next to his, with a bucket
in hand, with his back fused
and disintegrating,
his chest decades ago cut open.

In the skiff, ocean to his ankles,
only inches of freeboard,
my father bails and bails
like it was June, like it’s still his summer,

like the green tender-leaved dandelions
sheltered under our cabin steps,
the mosquito still buzzing
round the smokehouse, like my father’s hands

holding this gift out to me, offering
an oily, hot slice of smoked salmon
on a paper plate.

This Early Migration

At a one degree rise near midnight, a scrape of floorboard
clacks like stones, like a silty river spilling

between my sleeping breaths.

I awaken and rise, pausing at my bedroom doorway.—
At the front door, you, daughter, three years old,

in your rubber boots,

your coat upside down, your pudgy hand holds
the doorknob. Experts say its’s all about timing

and rapid microevolution in these warmer years—

a gene-switch is a door left unlatched. I want to ask
you where you’re going,

because pink salmon have the weakest homing instinct.

Mother-of-Humpy-Tail,
your traditional name—Cháas’ Koowú Tláa

Woman Who Calls Pink Salmon Back to the Stream.

The knob turns open the door, our woodstove smoke
meanders in cottony mist through trees and

the porch light moon-sways on water.

The open door welcomes dark night air and a rush of river
carpets the floor with a thousand swishing fins,

some hook-jawed and humped.

I don’t really need to know where you’re headed, child,
these emergences and outmigrations are often

the heaviest during the darkest hours.

They’ve pressed cool water against my calves before.
The first time I held you, when you were ocean fresh

and chrome-bright, I sensed you recognized

your natal stream, that you had journeyed this way
before, and one day you’ll be pale-bellied

with salmon scales sloughing, a sapling spruce
growing from the earth of your skin.

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on the island of Kaachx̱ana.áakʼw, Wrangell, Alaska, in the Alexander Archipelago. She lives and writes as a climate witness in Lingít Aaní on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan at Mickey’s Fishcamp near Keishangita.aan, Red Alder Head Village. She’s a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQIA group on the island. She’s the author of three poetry collections, five chapbooks, a book of linked short stories, and a foodoir. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she co-hosts the award-winning Planet Alaska Facebook page and Planet Alaska column appearing in the Juneau Empire.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023