Nerrivik

Do not mistake me for a mermaid.
Do not presume I’ll swim to the surface,
perch on a berg and croon.
Do not tell your kids coddled in caribou fur
a fairytale of my creation.
Hold the kayak of truth to their ears:
let them hear
            the slice
of the knife when my father chopped
       off my fingers,
my arctic howl as I sank
                             to the ocean floor,
the bloodsong of my thumbs as they bulged
                with blubber —
before my icestruck eyes, belugas formed.
My index fingers were instant narwhals —
                                             tusks burst
from nails. Ringed seals zinged
    from my middle fingers, while the littlest wriggled
          far from mammaldom, riddled
with gills and scales.

Do not, however, harpoon me with pity.
If my whalejaw comb cracks,
if the stumps of my wrists can’t clear
the knots from the thick black fronds of my hair,
I can summon a shaman to tackle the tangles,
with the weave and tickle of mackerel and cod.

All I demand is that you treat this zone,
which I was forced
to make my home, with care.
Do not thaw my ceiling.
Do not stain my walls with your crimson greed.
Don’t rip up my floor with your trawlers.
Don’t furnish me with debris from your submarines.

Remember — one shrug
     of my shoulders can cause
a four-day storm. I can calve bergs
                                         from glaciers
with the smallest sneeze. If I am displeased,
I will call the offspring of my fingers to me
and make fists to breach       your overwater world,
                               to punch
       your beloved sun           from its          sky.

Blodeuwedd in a Parka

i am winterstill
a mountain aven
i am a flirt of white
in the cave of the raven
the quiverwait
for the birthburst
of the sun
i am a tease
of roots nudging
the rocks trying
to budge
the permafrost
i’m a flutter
of eight lashes
round a yellow eye
that winks
at the sky as i seize
my one
brief chance
to bloom

and now i am taken
by the shaman,
                  mixed with milkvetch,
birch, moss campion
to make petalflesh
limbstamen
womb.

I am the wife of Ilukaq.
I stew berries and blubber for him to eat.
I chew sealskin to make soft boots for his feet.
With snow goose feathers, I sweep clean our home.
I carve him totems from the ice-bear’s thigh-bone.

But oh

I am another man’s lover,
a man whose touch uncovers
my desire
like a caribou licking
up lichen from under the snow.

So what am I to do but harpoon Ilukaq,
leaving him frozen in the only pose he knows —
kissing the lip of the seal’s breathing hole and

          now
               i am snatched
          by the       shaman
    face        smashedflat
                          against ice
              shoulderblades    scolded
                                into wings
               toes     crooked
                          into claws
             voice               scraped
                     hoarse

i hunt rodent dreams,
           plunder the tundra,
feed them to children,
           stoke their troubled sleep

i am the famine-owl,
           a hunger-howl —
the weeping of the people
           is steepled on my wings

i’m the mood-most-foul
           of those who fail to claim
the Pole — i’m so mad
           i could wring my own neck

i am the sadness
           of the melt —
my featherflecks reflect the eruptions
           of rock through ice

when i shut
           my sundog eyes
i’m shocked to realise
           that i’m still here

Where No Man has Gone

Cape Bountiful! he cries, aiming to lay claim
to the pristine land lying behind
the swell of her crinoline dress
and Conquest Cove! when he spies
the cleft in the ice shelf of her chest.
He doesn’t guess that she moves
the fake mole which marks the Pole
to a new space on her face each day.
He never sees that she conceals
snow geese up her sleeves,
while caribou hoof up lichen
beneath her hooped petticoats,
and polar bears den in the drifts
of her wig — the cubs he seeks to snatch
as gifts for his king will be safe,
at least, until spring.

Hungry for the tundra of her tongue, he shoves
against her; lunges
for the place where the hooded seal breathes,
harpoon primed. He believes
he can set up base, overwinter,
but two hundred years will go by
before he’ll shun
his flimsy breeches and learn
the techniques to survive.

With just one tweak
of her walrus-thumb, she seizes
his vitamins, unleashes
blizzards of liver spots
and spongy gums. She kills
the light with one blink
of her eye and the wind chill effect
from her satisfied sigh
makes his voice shatter —
C a p e       Des    o      l a t i o n …

Climate Control

North had the force of a man —
a man who never ate citrus,
who lived on ships’ biscuits
and pemmican.
He’d pick his teeth with a narwhal tusk,
wear eau de moss, muskeg, musk ox and bog.
His sneezes were geysirs;
he’d mop snot with his pocket ptarmigan.

Then, he fell in love. With her,
he learnt that sweat need not freeze,
he grew to believe in the existence of trees.

But she liked her fishscales blue and green,
and sun dripping sticky
between her breasts.
Why waste time on gloves
and decks slippery
with death?

The day she skipped away,
he felt his cod stocks deplete.
His dreams were flensed,
then rendered into grease
for soap and cheap cosmetics.

Now all he can do is gaze
at the gauze dress she left
pegged to the sky

and howl
the colours closer.