Joan Kane
3 poems
A Few Lines With Abigail Chabitnoy
Maybe we could stand in the sun until
someone tells us how bad things will get
This too is about where the heart isn’t See a woman
trudged near, cradling bones
not loss or lack but something as real as
my slate knife sharpened To incise
the caribou organs I spurn in assembly
but bring to my mother as my children
rustle the leaves of her drowned лес Englut men
with ambition recall the ocean perdu
A Few Lines With Sherman Alexie
How many Eskimo words are there for white people?
A region of the moon in a snow-blind noon
Bleached seal skin & wave-smoothed stone
Mouth thronged with schs and ors & knees
Ears, somewhere, adorned & unable to discern
is it worry is it question
A Few Lines with Monique Sanchez
Of course, I have a question more pressing but—
did the thyme survive the first deep freeze and snow?
And of course, there were sirens when I thought of you,
about the quadruple entendre of shots across the bow
and thus, was visited in an epiphany by Barbara Johnson
incarnate who, like you, reminds me to be aware
of my proximity to myself at all times. No gold here,
I heard. It could have been Z. atricapilla, its summer
thrum dimmed by gloom and calm that escapes me
now in October, the precursor to the dark winter
before the bright one that stirs when the light
blitzes back at the turn of the year. If only impaired
while permitted to be so all morning—I tried to train
various vines to climb and flower. If only I’d burnt
the birch branches I gathered, if only some last light
thronged the trees and interpreted green as green though—
green thought, though green, thyme-leaved, thyme-fed.
Joan Kane is the author of The Straits, Hyperboreal, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, and Milk Black Carbon, which was published in the 2017 Pitt Poetry Series. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts and raises her children in Anchorage, Alaska.