Winner of the 2020 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize
“Here But Elsewhere” is from MQR’s Winter 2022 Issue. You can purchase the issue here.
Winter 2022 | Bret Shepard Reads "Here But Elsewhere" – MQR Sound
Here But Elsewhere
Already sick, I waited for the doctor. Two
months later the appointment was canceled
as storm prevented flights into Atqasuk.
We build us alone. The solitary fox empties
the house of its many things. Days counting
pills to pollute the body like the ice warms
to its desires. Quiet deaths, these glaciers.
All the erratics, a kettle lake warms to boil.
Sedge edges the village, spreads. Dominant
brings to mind curved landscapes—a city
against the foothills, ocean to shore—even
tundra where tussocks seek enough height
to flower. Even with that there are eyes
reaching. This landscape appears beyond
desires shaped. Even without that, names
mapped it, those eyes running horizons.
-40 degrees—to touch each other is arrival.
Thirty-third spring. Painted tundra fills
the time. It looks like a scene we might find
in the open room beyond this room, far past
ourselves, a parade of caribou eyes aimed.
The absence is enormous in the Arctic.
Christian’s mother died when a rope
broke as she helped pull the bowhead
onto the beach, its recoil force enough
to kill what it hit the moment it did.
Some deaths create other ways to die.
Some losses you only understand once
your body and mind come back together
wherever it is beyond what we name.
On this street or that one, on Fireweed
or Tudor, maybe downtown Anchorage,
their blocks on my breath, if I see a story
repeat a gesture and fall, maybe as Jonah
would have years ago, winter on his face,
will it return as pores release in the night?
As we tilted our cold necks to the floor
one friend stood behind and pushed
hard on the back of our head to make us
black out. We tried to turn off, inhaling
days with every drug hidden in school
to leave us and return new metaphors.
HERE BUT ELSEWHERE
Emptiness is unresolved movement between two
events. At Meade River School we saw our home
outside the village. What forms in absence of sight
is body felt. We watched a body walk the unplowed
winter road parallel to our house but not reappear
to any eyes. My father ran home to catch the boy
using our phone. Ours was the only house he hoped
wouldn’t question a long-distance call to Anchorage
police. After public safety listened, after we heard
why, they returned him home to the grandmother
abusing him. Presence is language the body learns.
I showed up at school every day to say the words
of others, voices keeping a record of my presence
static and flattened. Most winter days gathered
like the absent bodies passed out from the previous
night, high in a bone-thin shack edging Browerville
where friends smoked out and then crashed, unsaid
names unrecorded. Sitting quiet at a sanitized desk
for certificates of official skin, I knew the absence
of veins in perfect attendance, the flatness of words
formed and spoken. The only answer was here.
HERE BUT ELSEWHERE
Language doesn’t make decisions. It keeps
guessing. When I was given my Inupiaq
name, Jenny Felder talked me into sounds
from the book listing each possible version
nearby. I still hear her. I would speak them
now if my mouth could shape the words.
Snow takes the most of us when it comes
to fall. In what felt like Spokane’s worst
snowstorm for decades, my brother and I
only had mukluks for our feet, the fur warm
and foreign, absent of what had sold out
in stores across the white city. All we had
was distance. All we wanted were the snow
boots with the Velcro every other kid wore.
We carry too much of the past. Expansive
bodies like snow melt. It’s not the only thing
leaving, leaving, leaving. It melts into smaller
bodies of water, so we must wade through it
to the source, because the arctic doesn’t freeze
itself. It grows into what it must be, and is.
For more from the Winter 2022 issue of MQR, you can purchase the issue here.
