After Anchorage IV

Joan Naviyuk Kane

of gadolinium, November-veined, copper on the tongue
& summoning sleep & ether though wide-awake
after click & whir & click again of excision & extraction

& artery notched & every hand in the dim back room
summoned to press the bloodied breast to bone
& told to find calm & stay calm & O type O negative

& calm & fuck the radiologist who would remember
the day years after, bumbling mutters
& with whiskey-thick fingers on black Friday & routine

gone awry & no luck for transfusion & hours later
to be wheeled out into the familiar lobby to my
children’s father & my father who, terse & inconvenienced

would warn me off from flying the next day & the next
through Seattle & de Gaulle & landing bleary at Boryspil
& to blur through birch woods, woozy still, & sore

& o sour viburnum opulus & o ash & ache to come

Joan Naviyuk Kane is is the author of Ex Machina (Staircase Books, 2023), Another Bright Departure (CutBank, 2019); Milk Black Carbon (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017); Hyperboreal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013); and The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (NorthShore Press, 2009) among other titles.

About Joan Naviyuk Kane

Themes

About this Poem

“I wrote the poem ‘After Anchorage IV’ about a doctor hitting one of my arteries during a last-minute biopsy in November 2015, the day after so-called Thanksgiving, and a day before I was scheduled to fly to Ukraine with the International Writing Program. It’s part of a new series called ‘After Anchorage,’ and while I try to employ other poetic forms, this one’s in a ‘hell tercet’ familiar to me in these last years. Lately, I’m writing in a more narrative vein; this poem’s symptomatic of what [John] Keats called an ‘irritable reaching after fact,’ contrary to his notion of negative capability.”
—Joan Naviyuk Kane

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Exceeding Beringia

“I remember the birds ever so many of them when I hunted with the weapons of a child. The water was covered in their numbers, red as the flowers of summer on the mountain. The red phalarope were our prey of choice, there were so many. Today, these birds return yearly, but now only a few return home in spring to show us they remain a part of the land, as we are.” —Herbert Aġiyġaq Anungazuk

Joan Naviyuk Kane

2016

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After Anchorage IV

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After Anchorage IV

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