by Building Fires in the Snow- A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction
“I miss you,” Pete thought, but didn’t say aloud. “I just miss you, Luke.”
It was true and would be, and life went on. And it was too late to know how much it mattered, the things they’d never talked about and never would. Already, Luke’s face was fading in his mind. He didn’t want that, didn’t want to be growing old while Luke himself would always be young. Didn’t want to lose even this hurt. But it happened that way.
ELIZABETH BRADFIELD
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, and Once Removed. An instructor in the low-residency MFA program at University of Alaska Anchorage, contributing editor for Alaska Quarterly Review, and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod and works a naturalist.
Eight Years
We pulled snowshoes from the back and crossed the five-lane
by the sports bar between two bad curves,
headed to the bog. It was midday,
sky low, traffic a light drone. We cinched
straps, stomped teeth into the trailhead,
took snapshots of ourselves and set off
for the muffle of woods and the snow we hoped
now would carry us, and mostly didn’t, but still
seemed somehow better as we followed
tracks, reconstructed pounce and dodge, waiting
for the place to raise voice. And when it didn’t
we turned toward home, stopped listening, and I
started mugging for you, showing off, and I thought
as I ran along the trail, snow slapping up the backs
of my thighs,
maybe we have found it, the thing
where neither is better or cares or clocks the length.
The thing that makes us beautiful.
And when I turned
to shout back, what escaped was
Moose. Dewlap swinging, shoulder hump
rocking in gait, heading out of the trees
the way I’d come, toward you.
Somewhere, there’s a tally sheet that reckons up
how often we say we’re happy and mean it,
and we, in the messy and reasonable panic
of our lives, just lost our chance to earn a point.
The moose ran out from the trees and I ran back
to you and we stared and backed away together,
frightened by the huge answer of its body.
Legacy
—for Vitus Bering
They’ve closed again the gap that you first sailed,
Russian-sponsored Dane, so cousins on the Diomedes
are in post–Cold War touch. But you made the map
that made the border, sighting lands just guessed at
between Kamchatka and America’s west coast. And we
write history from what’s put down officially, maps
and logbooks made and kept by the survivors
of your death, of your loss of ambition from years
line-toeing across the forehead of Siberia. Finally you set sail for
glory—or not for but from whatever pushes us beyond
our birth-spots. What pushes us away? I, too, have left
for some spot unknown by those who claim me, for
place unhooked from kin and story. I’ve fled
the watched life of any hometown where if
you kick a dog, infect a girl, break a window
the girl turns out to be your mother’s landlord’s
cousin, the dog a beat cop’s mutt, and shards
cut your sister’s foot: Each chafed-at thing’s a window
in your glass-house world. So the age-old lust for places
we pretend are free of consequence. It’s the same
now as it was with Oedipus, poor stiff, running to escape his fate
and running smack dab into it, an awful
scene, a nightmare warning we need to keep
repeating because, of course, fate
never seems immediate. For weeks Bering’s crew feasted
on the delicious bulk of sea cows (now extinct).
They played cards, anted up with otter pelts that promyshlenniki later
stripped from the shores. Foxes bit the men’s toes
at night. The land ate them as they ate the land,
calling it need, worrying about it later.
Roughnecks and Rakes One and All, the Poet Speaks to Her Subjects, Polar Explorers
I won’t write you that voice,
piggy, crass
forged by salt &
cold & isolation.
Filed to edge
by time-wrung,
absence-wrought rasping
or, if not those,
by what made you endure.
I know we’re
bad luck on boats,
women, worse
on ice, too humid
for this hoar.
And you hate my pen
tracking through
your stories. But
I write you,
and that’s what love you get,
meted out, doled like rum.
Through line and vowel, my
voice chooses
yours, forced
by yours.
I’d like to say
local deviations
make this
true enough
triangulation
for polar work,
that despite my distance
and the tendency of light
over ice toward mirage,
some shape comes through
that both of us
can recognize.
Correcting the Landscape
Even though the wrecked jeep
belonged to Pat, it felt like stealing to go through
chain link into the scrap yard, jack up
each corner and switch out his new tires
with our bald ones. It was twelve below.
The snow squeaked underfoot
like Styrofoam. We were trying to make it in a place
where everything we thought we needed
—sheetrock, tomatoes, polypro—
had to be shipped in from Outside.
There was a raven calling, watery cluck
echoing the lot. There was us cursing
the lug nuts, then another sound,
out of place, high and keen
and you and I startle like any goddamn bird.
I see your head tilt, ear
to sky, and while Anne is jumping
blood back into her toes and Pat is wrestling
with the left rear, there is within this scene another:
A peregrine calls and we both look up, catch each other doing it,
then laugh. Because it’s not likely a falcon here,
February in central Alaska. The call sounds again,
and a few pigeons startle, birds that arrived with
the wires and poles. And that’s why we hear it,
set on some timer to cry away
those pushy opportunists
at the foothills of the Chugach,
throats cold in the day’s short light.
Creation Myth: Periosteum and Self
Hormonally imbalanced females of all deer species
have been known to grow antlers.
This is what I choose. Periosteum rampant on my brow
and testosterone to activate it at the pedicle.
“Luxury organs,” so called because they aren’t
necessary for survival.
I choose the possibility buried in the furrow
which has ceased to disappear between my eyes
in sleep, in skin my lover has touched her lips to.
Females produce young each year. Males produce antlers.
Forget the in-vitro, expensive catheter of sperm
slipped past the cervix, the long implications
of progeny. I am more suited to other s
ciences, other growth.
Researchers have snipped bits of periosteum
from pedicles, grafted them onto other parts
of a buck’s body, and grown antlers.
I’ll graft it to my clavicle. My cheekbone.
Ankle. Coccyx. Breast. At last visible,
the antler will grow. Fork and tine. Push and splay.
Researchers have tricked deer into growing and casting
as many as four sets of antlers in one calendar year.
It won’t wait for what’s appropriate, but starts
in the subway, in the john, talking to a friend about her sorrows,
interviewing for a job. My smooth desk, my notebook,
my special pen with particular ink, my Bach playing
through the wall of another room—not the location
of the prepared field, but what the light says, when
the light says now.
Deer literally rob their body skeletons to grow
antlers they’ll abandon a few months later.
It could care less about the inconvenience forking
from my knee, the difficulty of dressing, embracing, or
piloting a car. It doesn’t care
Essentially bucks and bulls are slaves to their antlers.
if I’m supposed to be paying bills or taking the dog
for her evening walk. There is no sense to it, no logic, just thrust.
It does its work. It does its splendid, difficult, ridiculous work and then,
making room for its next, more varied rising,
gorgeous and done, it falls away.
Remodeling
—for Lisa
We want a hole in the north wall, a hole
then a window, for light, for the green spruce
just beyond the vinyl siding. We’ve managed
to forget the night last spring
when Emilio, Michael, and Pierce, whose baseballs
we return, who we lecture on the sensitivity
of tomato plants to hockey pucks, who ring our doorbell
selling chocolate and wrapping paper
. . . we’ve almost forgotten the night last spring
when the boys climbed the shed roof
and saw this:
my shirt up around my neck,
your hand on my breast, my body beneath
yours, moving.
When I opened my eyes and said shit, you
buried your face in the couch, as if
they might assume your short hair meant man,
as if that might be better. And instead of cursing
them, instead of throwing open the window
and telling them off, I pulled the blinds and hid.
And for months we skulked to the mailbox,
walked the dog in distant parks, imagined
the stories rumoring and how they’d sound
when they reached the parents:
They were doing it in the back yard, under spotlights,
charging admission. We didn’t admit
to each other that we waited for the spraypaint,
the busted taillights. Worse, we were ready
to understand . . . But now
we want a window in the north wall.
We want the spruce-shade. We want
to announce how much we love
the sky, how its light finds us, too,
even here.
Concerning the Proper Term for a Whale Exhaling
Poof my mother sighs
as against the clearcut banks near Hoonah
another humpback exhales, its breath
white and backlit by sun.
Don’t
say that, says my father, disapproving
of such casual terminology or uneasy
with the tinge of pink tulle, the flounce
poof attaches to the thing we’re watching, beast
of hunt, of epic migrations.
But I’m the naturalist,
suggesting course and speed for approach. They
are novices, and the word is mine,
brought here from the captains I sailed for
and the glittering Cape Cod town
where we docked each night
after a day of watching whales.
Poof,
Todd or Lumby would gutter,
turning the helm, my cue to pick up
the microphone. Coming from those smoke-roughed cynics
who call the whales dumps, rank the tank-topped talent
on the bow, and say each time they set a breaching calf
in line with the setting sun, What do you think of that? Now that’s
what I call pretty, then sit back,
light a cigarette—coming from them,
I loved the word.
And even more
because the dock we returned to each night
teemed with summer crowds, men lifting
their hands to other men, the town
flooded with poufs free to flutter, to cry, as they can’t
in Newark or Pittsburgh or Macon, to let
their love rise into the clear, warm air,
to linger and glow
for a brief time visible.
We All Want to See a Mammal
We all want to see a mammal.
Squirrels & snowshoe hares don’t count.
Voles don’t count. Something, preferably,
that could do us harm. There’s a long list:
bear, moose, wolf, wolverine. Even porcupine
would do. The quills. The yellowed
teeth & long claws.
Beautiful here: Peaks, avens,
meltwater running its braided course. But we want
to see a mammal. Our day our lives incomplete
without a mammal. The gaze of something
unafraid, that we’re afraid of, meeting ours
before it runs off.
Linnaeus was called
indecent when he named them. Plenty
of other commonalities (hair, live young,
a proclivity to plot). But no. Mammal.
Maman. Breasted & nippled
& warm, warm, warm.
August, McCarthy, Alaska
I do love you a little more
tenderly the first few days
after leaving home.
The river here,
sweetheart, is lined with beauty,
those pink flowers that grow first
in spring’s flood-swept banks.
I’m half
here, half back with you. This
and this and this you’d love.
The cottonwoods. The peaks.
Fall
is breathing on the land’s neck.
Another cycle that should give
comfort, and does, but only
in fact. Not
in metaphoric reach. I’ll be home
soon. Not soon, but I’ll be home. I’ll work
to reconcile what I remember of us
with what
we are. The river is the river, despite
its new channel, which made the bridge
both pointless and ruined. Because we need it
it gets rebuilt every year.
MARTHA AMORE
Martha Amore teaches writing at Alaska Pacific University and the University of Alaska Anchorage. She achieved her Masters of Fine Arts from UAA, and she has published stories in a number of journals and magazines. Her first novella came out in 2013 in the anthology Weathered Edge: Three Alaskan Novellas. In 2015, she won a Rasmuson Individual Artist Award to complete her collection of short stories. She lives in Anchorage with her husband, three daughters, two cats, and one big dog.
Geology
Geyserites. Black opal. Shale storm. Layers of rock covering the hot liquid core of the planet are more real to her than the ever-shifting human landscape. Once she had broken a bone. No, once a bone had been broken for her. Her stepfather in a
storm and drunk, breaking her arm so that the white bone flashed for just a moment in the earth’s long flow of time. Bright white before blood and darkness overcame her.
“My sense of time is all messed up,” Kris says soon after we meet.
We are two women at a party full of bearded men, a sprawling Alaska affair with two bonfires, three kegs, and an edgy pack of dogs vying for salmon skin and dominance. My husband left hours ago, and now the cold of freeze-up has driven us into a cavernous garage. The cement floor is slick with beer, and the place smells of yeast and motor oil. A too-loud boy band has her coming in close, yelling her words. I like how she leans into me, her lips occasionally grazing my ear.
“Normal people think in terms of hours, days, weeks. I think in terms of millions of years.” A sly smile spreads from her full lips to her dark lashes. Fine lines, three of them, stretch from the corners of her eyes, which, blue or green, I can’t decide. “Lisa,” she says, “do you know how old the earth is?”
I squint across the crowded room as though the answer were written on the far wall. The only number that comes to mind is eleven thousand, which is not the age of our planet but the number of wolves in Alaska. I match her smile. “Older than me?”
“What are you, thirty?”
“And then some.”
“The planet is a bit older than that.” As she speaks, she puts a hand to my hip. “Six billion years. Can you get your mind around that?”
“No.”
Her hand stays on me.
Was it the broken arm that saved her life? Finally, a visible wound. Her mother had no choice but to take action and leave her stepfather. No, I think she saved herself. The form of escape she chose, not drugs or self-loathing, but college. Geology.
The first day her professor cast away the syllabus and hefted a cracked-in-half stone. A private universe of bright sherbet lacework lay hidden within the thick gray husk, and at the very center, a hollow the size of a child’s fist.
“This is a geode,” her professor said, walking up and down the aisle with the cracked stone in his palms. He pointed to the blue crystal ring, “Quartz,” and to the spread of pink, “Dolomite.” Then, he smoothed his finger along the purple streaks of crystal and said, “Amethyst.”