Tag: Abigail Chabitnoy

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy

AS FAR AS RECORDS GO

I.
The women in this story never had a chance, did they Michael?
It’s sons we tell stories for.
Their skins and grasses and birch
bark rarely survive
the archaeological record.
I found your sister in another record,
in a family archive as it were
of dubious descent—

82 iii. Nikifor (1897–1897)
Occupation: Infant

A grave shaped hole.
Possibly, an empty house.
(a painted box
sealed tight against
the weather: )

II.
Woman are always talking about the weather—
“Our people have made it through lots of storms and disasters
for thousands of years. All the troubles since the [promyshlenniki] . . .
like one long stretch of bad weather . . . like
everything . . . this storm will pass over some day.”
(On the island without trees, with wind no man
could walk against, it rains two hundred and fifty days of the year.)

III.
Across the sea certain women were believed
to have power over the weather:
when weather was inclement, the women were exposed
naked to the elements until weather changed—
or they died.
(But I read this in some academic work or coffee table book
on Aleut or Unangan art, so there might be a connection besides

Church records show—

IV.
Then there was Lillian Zellers—
What kind of woman married an Indian
in those days?

(It was in the papers:) INDIAN MARRIES WHITE GIRL
ALASKAN GRADUATE OF CALISLE MAKES
LEBANON YOUNG WOMAN HIS BRIDE.

I imagine someone in her family was tall—
there’s no accounting for our height if she were not tall.
Or am I mistaking mothers again?

Even this is your story, Michael. There was no bearing daughters.

I suppose there must be somebody alive
somebody would know—

but letters are an accreted loss
like skins and bark and mothers
appeal to me as mystery.

V.
There was no bearing daughters. Turns out
my black-haired grandma was no Indian
after all. Not Aleut.

I never met the men
who gave me their bones.

VI.
My mother was a Mole. (Names have been changed
but records are rare
-ly consistent—
enough blood to trace,
enough bodies in marked graves to remember,
enough, enough.)

And now I’ve gone and changed my name for legal reasons
letting down my sons and daughters.
(My husband would not have let them be salmon-fishers
anyways.)

VII.
No, the women in this story never had a chance, Nikifor.
It’s fathers we make bodies for.

This selection comes from the book, How to Dress a Fish, available from Wesleyan University Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Abigail Chabitnoy earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow and 2020 Kenyon Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellow. She has been a resident of Caldera and the Wrangell Arts Center, and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska, was raised in Pennsylvania, and is currently a consultant for a company in CO that works to facilitate tribal self-determination. Her debut poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish, was released from Wesleyan University Press. Visit her website at salmonfisherpoet.com for more information. Twitter Handle: @achabitnoy

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy

BEFORE THERE WAS A TRAIN

I built my home
from perfumed skins
and crooked bones
far from the rotting boat
They took
the wrong shape
Sod not ice not body
not Other
Nikiiq
Engluq nikiimek patumauq
The wrong tongue
By the time you read this
I will have forgotten how to say
the house is covered with sod
or home
Part of me wishes it had sunk
it sank
it is sinking
but these sentences have not been written
Only, allrani suu’ut caqainek pukugtaartut
sometimes people salvage some stuff

She coughed and the women came out
violently
She opened her mouth and coughed out
a small bird
She coughed out matted fur
and fish with faces
and the rocks
she had tried to eat
until
there was nothing left inside her
but water and red
She coughed out the water
and the sea rushed to fill
the thirsting places
She took back fire
black fire-rock
and wrapped her many-body
in mountain
still and moving
many and
one
She wrapped her body in mountain
and dug her feet beneath the water
she spilled
where soft
she could feel a hardness moving
outward

She could feel many hearts
hard hearts
each small disturbance
press
the small rooms of her chest
Each sound in her chest
a heart
a rock
dislodging soft in the water
until
She was no body

 

 

 

This selection comes from the book, How to Dress a Fish, available from Wesleyan University Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Abigail Chabitnoy earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow and 2020 Kenyon Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellow. She has been a resident of Caldera and the Wrangell Arts Center, and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska, was raised in Pennsylvania, and is currently a consultant for a company in CO that works to facilitate tribal self-determination. Her debut poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish, was released from Wesleyan University Press. Visit her website at salmonfisherpoet.com for more information. Twitter Handle: @achabitnoy

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate. 

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy

QAWANGUQ WITH HOUSE

There was a house I needed
to go
I needed a home
to survive
to wait the fire
the flood where there were others
with other
bodies
There was earth in them
I dug
speaking
the dead with words
I dug my way back
to survive the flood
into the earth
I had to know what I didn’t know You can’t throw the fish
I didn’t know back in the water
what kind of monster was I and expect to swim—
So I dug.
I dug out a rib
and another’s rib
another
I dug deeper
until
I reached the bottom of this

house I reached the cellar
where the center was cold
where I could hide
My body full of bodies

This selection comes from the book, How to Dress a Fish, available from Wesleyan University Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Abigail Chabitnoy earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow and 2020 Kenyon Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellow. She has been a resident of Caldera and the Wrangell Arts Center, and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska, was raised in Pennsylvania, and is currently a consultant for a company in CO that works to facilitate tribal self-determination. Her debut poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish, was released from Wesleyan University Press. Visit her website at salmonfisherpoet.com for more information. Twitter Handle: @achabitnoy

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy

LESSONS IN ARTICULATION

He didn’t tell us when he learned what it meant,
that they took their words from them.
If he were not an accountant, my father,
he might have been a historian. A fisherman. Or
he might have been nobody. He might have been unsettled.
Father, did you have these questions, when you were young with only
your cousin, your aunt?
Father, did your father know?
Did your father tell you,
how he and his brother were called half-breed,
how he didn’t know his father?
Did you read to your mother?
Did you read to your dog, until you could pronounce the words properly?
Did you eat Hershey’s Chocolate toast sandwiches with your father?
Did your father read aloud from his bible, or
did he keep his words from you?
Father, did you dream then of salt sweeping your lungs, of sand
and volcanic rock beneath
your feet, or snow?
Did you watch the birds as a boy for Company?
Did you try to give them names?
Father, did you play Indians?
Or were you cowboys?
How did you feel, the way your father asked your mother
for a sandwich and a beer,
and a beer,
like a man?
Mother says these things skip a generation.

I don’t remember learning these words—
deprivation, decimation, assimilation,
relocation.
I don’t remember Carlisle in my school books. Was it something
you showed me, Father, that summer
we toured all the battlefields?
If he were not an accountant, my father,
he might have been a historian.
But there was no value in these things,
no way he could convey.
I don’t know when I learned what it meant,
they took our words from us.

This selection comes from the book, How to Dress a Fish, available from Wesleyan University Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Abigail Chabitnoy earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow and 2020 Kenyon Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellow. She has been a resident of Caldera and the Wrangell Arts Center, and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska, was raised in Pennsylvania, and is currently a consultant for a company in CO that works to facilitate tribal self-determination. Her debut poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish, was released from Wesleyan University Press. Visit her website at salmonfisherpoet.com for more information. Twitter Handle: @achabitnoy

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy

Fox Hunting

Last winter I [had a thought, go out],ii hunt foxes.
iii
, and, having come
to the opening of a little hut , I entered it
and apparently there was a fox there, I didn’t
see , but when it was seen and pointed to me
I could shoot
I ran
, but running after it I
finally lost my breath
under a rock,
pulled from there
, then I walked and walked
, and seemed to
be a fox but didn’t see , but
started to run again, shot , so
I came back two .
After I went to sleep,
the day got up again
to hunt fox [.] I passed
to the other side
one fox
up the hill
thinking how I was
a piece
daylight the hill
the isthmus,
the north side,
a storm

the sea,
the canyon
a fire a little cave
the night
entered
until the morning,
the wind
a pit in the snow
slept in until the morning, daylight
descended
from
foxes
and steam
and went home
.
i Told by Stepan Prokopyev, Attu, August, 1909. Cylinders 25 and 26 ( four minutes and
forty-five seconds). Transcribed and translated into Eastern Aleut by Jochelson and
Yachmenev with the help of Stepan Prokopyev, Umnak, 1910. Of the paired lines, the first is
Attuan, the second Eastern Aleut. The written text differs in several spots from the cylinders.
New York Public Library Manuscript 61.
ii Contamination (or copying mistake).
iii Some words missing

 

This selection comes from the book, How to Dress a Fish, available from Wesleyan University Press.  Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.

Abigail Chabitnoy earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow and 2020 Kenyon Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellow. She has been a resident of Caldera and the Wrangell Arts Center, and her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska, was raised in Pennsylvania, and is currently a consultant for a company in CO that works to facilitate tribal self-determination. Her debut poetry collection, How to Dress a Fish, was released from Wesleyan University Press. Visit her website at salmonfisherpoet.com for more information. Twitter Handle: @achabitnoy

Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate.