1. Violent collisions— shoals giving way to brine concentrate the Beaufort Sea thickened into a lens aimed at our theories, our coasted bodies we sink inside. 2. Colonizing the Arctic Circle, nitrogen cycles tundra. Arctic lupine spreads millennia old seeds further than holes drilled near Prudhoe Bay. What is time into pieces, but fossils machines grind down. 3. It was once called Barrow— a colonizer leaves as much as he takes so you know what names to call him. 4. Ten thousand years on the same coasts bowhead whales gave muktuk, baleen— events bent as far as they can bend from tradition.
BRET SHEPARD is from the North Slope of Alaska. He is the author of Absent Here, winner of the 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and Place Where Presence Was, as well as two chapbooks, including The Territorial, which won the Midwest Chapbook Award from the Laurel Review. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Florida Review, Mississippi Review, Southern Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, which awarded him the Goldstein Prize. He currently lives outside of Philadelphia and teaches at Goldey-Beacom College.
