Cathy Tagnet Rexford, Inupiaq,
Poet and playwright Cathy Tagnak Rexford was born in Alaska and is of Inupiaq, French, German, and English descent. She earned an MFA from the University of British Columbia, where she is currently pursuing a PhD. Grounded in photography and lyric documentary, her poetry has appeared in various anthologies. Her chapbook Black Ice appeared in Effigies: An Anthology of New Indigenous Writing, Pacific Rim (2009), and individual poems have appeared in Ahani: Indigenous American Poetry (2007) and To Topos Poetry International (1999). She is the author of A Crane Story (illustrated by Sini Salminen, 2013). Her plays include The Namesake and, with Challen Wilson, The Winter Overture; Rexford also works on short films. She has received fellowships from the First Peoples House of Learning and the Rasmuson Foundation.*
*http://cathyrexford.com/
*http://cathyrexford.com/
The Ecology of Subsistence
Cathy Tagnak Rexford
No daylight for two months, an ice chisel slivers
frozen lake water refracting blue cinders.
By light of an oil lamp, a child learns to savor marrow:
cracked caribou bones a heap on the floor.
A sinew, thickly wrapped in soot, threads through
the meat on her chin: a tattoo in three slender lines.
One white ptarmigan plume fastened to the lip of
a birch wood basket; thaw approaches: the plume turns brown.
On the edge of the open lead, a toggle-head harpoon
waits to launch: bowhead sings to krill.
Thickened pack ice cracking; a baleen fishing line
pulls taut a silver dorsal fin of a round white fish.
A slate-blade knife slices along the grain of a caribou
hindquarter; the ice cellar lined in willow branches is empty.
Saltwater suffuses into a flint quarry, offshore
a thin layer of radiation glazes leathered walrus skin.
Alongside shatters of a hummock, a marsh marigold
flattens under three black toes of a sandhill crane.
A translucent sheep horn dipper skims a freshwater stream;
underneath, arctic char lay eggs of mercury.
Picked before the fall migration, cloudberries
drench in whale oil, ferment in a sealskin poke.
A tundra swan nests inside a rusted steel drum;
she abandons her newborns hatched a deep crimson.*
*http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/catalogs/dlg_show_excerpt.php?id=2299
CIB
Kin 216: Yellow Galactic Warrior
I harmonize in order to question
Modeling fearlessness
I seal the output of intelligence
With the galactic tone of integrity
I am guided by the power of universal fire.
Each application of the synchronic order to realize a more integrated state of mind and being accelerates the entire evolution of the planet.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2015-2016.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Muladhara Chakra (Limi Plasma)
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