Split Bone

dg okpik

A break in the blood vessel from split bone
like a porcupine quill pierces my ulcerated foot.

Decrepit I walk with wolverines
on the edge of the ice shelf. I neatly stitch

with two threads a cyst containing blood.
In the opposite poles of a cell a shallow alcove,

of the northern Pacific a right whale swims
in a rancid blue stew full of milk salmon

which feed brown bear. I transfuse quantum
in gradients of one minus energy, a closed universe,

foraging death in a another body, mixing with black
blood, I become a carrion beetle, bones outside.

A figure shaped like an inverted heart
stiffly mingling between body blue inuas spirits.

Moon of the Returning Sun

A view from two sides of Polaris, it is said:
                                    the living awaits destined relatives to retort.

 

These people go around waking the sleeping ones
when the weather is good:                 they wait for those
                                                            -who-are-coming-around-the-bend.

            Kainnaaq said,

            “In the beginning of the universe,
            when you were young long ago,
            the sky was dark and underneath us.
            Down under there was no sun until
            the world turned over and became
            the sky we have now.”

                                                            It is said: Down under lived two wolves
                                                            who had two children, a boy and a girl.

From these wolves-of-part-man, all the people
            came to be and multiplied.

I as wolf girl                           became weary of the light
dwell in darkness                  long time ago I was taken
away from Utqiagvik                         by the ones in black cloaks, 

                                    adopted.
I wait for the universe to turn
                                                                        around again,                                  
            wait for a reason to move the fetus  in my womb
                                    wait for Raven to bring back the sun       
                                                            for     recovery/extraction

                                                            with a sealskin satchel
                                                            birch bark and pencil
                                                            wolf girl rewrites tundra

dg okpik
dg okpik

dg nanouk okpik is an Alaskan Native, Inupiaq--Inuit from Anchorage, Alaska.  Her family resides in Barrow, Alaska.  Okpik graduated with AFA in 2004 and a BFA in Creative Writing with honors in 2005 at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2003, she received the Truman Capote Literary Trust Award. Okpik is currently employed at Santa Fe Indian Boarding School. Okpik graduated in January 2010 with a MFA in Creative Writing at Stonecoast College in Portland, Maine.  Okpik has published NYU Literary Journal, and Ahani Indigenous Anthology and The Academy of American Poets with introduction by Arthur Sze. Okpik is published with Salt Publishing in the United Kingdom in an anthology of Indigenous Women from Hawaii and Alaska, called Effigies. Upcoming introduction in Poetry Lore by Dennis Nurkse.