Apocalyptic Guidebook to a Glacier

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I trained my eyes to see,
in real time, the morning

when the gravel and ice moved back
and stumps and logs still bearing

roots and bark appeared
like storied relics,

exposed for the first time
in a thousand years.

The helicopters hovered
and boats collided

in the dazzled blink of a thousand
eyes and cameras and phones

reflecting on the ice.
What remained of its blue veins

fractured and tumbled into the bay.
The earth sprang up and we felt

a perishing groan.
Men and women in white coveralls

and white helmets
bent down with magnifying

glasses to examine
the chattermarks and striations

left as it cut away, as it melted,
as it broke off, as it surged into the inlet

And what no one considered
was the snowflea eating algae

and the bear’s wet paw prints
drying in the brash light of us.

This selection comes from The Last Glacier at the End of the World, available from Split Rock Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised in Wrangell, a small island community is Southeastern Alaska. She lives in Wrangell at her family’s fishcamp—Mickey’s Fishcamp. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska and a PhD in Cross Cultural Studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’s a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQ group on the island. Prescott is also a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi, and writes frequently about Sámi diaspora and climate change in Alaska. She is a two-time recipient of a Rasmuson Fellowship (2015, 2019) and a recipient of the Alaska Literary Award (2017). Prescott is the author of four chapbooks, two full-length poetry books, and a short story collection. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she writes a column for the Juneau Empire called Planet Alaska. For more information, visit: vivianfaithprescott.com. Twitter: planet_alaska and poet_tweet. Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.

Top Ten Signs of Climate Change

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1. My father tells a story of a severe winter that lingered through
   March: The earth shook; my cousin was swept away by a tidal
   wave. That winter, my father dug up a frozen sewer main by
   hand to unthaw it. Fishermen had a good salmon catch that
   year.
2. I inhale too many mosquitos now.
3. The salmon berries are rotten from the sun.
4. The thimbleberries are rotten from the torrential rain.
5. My father goes out trolling and doesn’t catch a salmon.
   My father goes out trolling again and doesn’t catch a salmon.
6. We don’t eat shelled sea creatures: no crab, no cockles, no clams
   or geoducks. We know better.—Alexandrium species,
   Pseudo-nitzschia species, Dinophysis species.
7. My sister’s ex sister-in-law is shot to death along with her
   teenage daughter and niece by my ex-husband’s new girlfriend’s
   ex-husband. He murdered them and then shot himself—and
   caused a heat sink scenario, the water bodies at the terminus
   acted as thermal energy and Shakes Glacier began to retreat.
8. My father tells the story of working in the sawmill, of working at
   the Forest Service, of fishing for winter kings. He stares out the
   window of our fishcamp, at the 50 degree ocean, and imagines
   another story.
9. Legend says my children’s ancestors travelled over ice. My own
   ancestors migrated over ice across Scandinavia after the Wind
   Man cleared a path with a shovel. I think about this legend. I
   invent words for our new oral tradition: neoglacialgenic,
   defishification, griefologic cycle.
10. My normothermia is 101.6 degrees.

This selection comes from The Last Glacier at the End of the World, available from Split Rock Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised in Wrangell, a small island community is Southeastern Alaska. She lives in Wrangell at her family’s fishcamp—Mickey’s Fishcamp. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska and a PhD in Cross Cultural Studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’s a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQ group on the island. Prescott is also a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi, and writes frequently about Sámi diaspora and climate change in Alaska. She is a two-time recipient of a Rasmuson Fellowship (2015, 2019) and a recipient of the Alaska Literary Award (2017). Prescott is the author of four chapbooks, two full-length poetry books, and a short story collection. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she writes a column for the Juneau Empire called Planet Alaska. For more information, visit: vivianfaithprescott.com. Twitter: planet_alaska and poet_tweet. Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.

Much Addicted to the Superstitions of Their Ancestors

In Sámi culture there are hundreds of words for snow.

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No one else looks as closely
at the edges of light, at the wavelengths,
refracting through ancient bergs.

No one else dreams of ice as he does
at the back of the bookstore
thumbing through musty old books,

how the scent of ancient things
causes him to swoon.
This is how he finds himself

stranded on an ice-floe
every morning, sitting on the bathroom floor
staring at the small crevasses,

those shallow cuts on his skin.
They say that with the help of a seer
one can see beneath the ice.

For thousands of years he’s wiped away
his same reflection—
bođus: ice-floes floating-separately collectively;

sáisa: mass of packed ice pressed up on or towards the shore,
from the wet mirrored glass,
an image of the light absorbing into him,

traveling deeper and deeper,
all colors disappearing until all that remains
is a shock of blue.

This selection comes from The Last Glacier at the End of the World, available from Split Rock Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised in Wrangell, a small island community is Southeastern Alaska. She lives in Wrangell at her family’s fishcamp—Mickey’s Fishcamp. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska and a PhD in Cross Cultural Studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’s a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQ group on the island. Prescott is also a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi, and writes frequently about Sámi diaspora and climate change in Alaska. She is a two-time recipient of a Rasmuson Fellowship (2015, 2019) and a recipient of the Alaska Literary Award (2017). Prescott is the author of four chapbooks, two full-length poetry books, and a short story collection. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she writes a column for the Juneau Empire called Planet Alaska. For more information, visit: vivianfaithprescott.com. Twitter: planet_alaska and poet_tweet. Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.

Geological Forces

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She was covered with humankind
and their flawed gifts:

broken little birds, dried berries, their thirst.

But nothing they could offer
could make her forget the last 12.5 million years,

how the ice sheet covered the expanse,

how snow changed to firn,
then a season’s melt. Over and over,

layers of corn snow melting and compressing.

She believes in her grieving,
yet believes in ordinary people,

who, like her body, will forgive the rain,
the wet earth.

But she still wonders how they figure
what to offer up to the impossible,

or if they know that all of this is holy,

especially the single snowflake crushed
beneath their feet.

This selection comes from The Last Glacier at the End of the World, available from Split Rock Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised in Wrangell, a small island community is Southeastern Alaska. She lives in Wrangell at her family’s fishcamp—Mickey’s Fishcamp. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska and a PhD in Cross Cultural Studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’s a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQ group on the island. Prescott is also a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi, and writes frequently about Sámi diaspora and climate change in Alaska. She is a two-time recipient of a Rasmuson Fellowship (2015, 2019) and a recipient of the Alaska Literary Award (2017). Prescott is the author of four chapbooks, two full-length poetry books, and a short story collection. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she writes a column for the Juneau Empire called Planet Alaska. For more information, visit: vivianfaithprescott.com. Twitter: planet_alaska and poet_tweet. Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.

How to Survive a Glacial Meltdown

Acquire animal skills.
Become a loon, a haunting crier,
swallowing the remains of this world underwater.

Learn to skin. Yourself.
Pull your feathered hood
over your head, adjust your chinstrap

to your throat.
Know where the sacred places are,
because there is no

safe place. Your homeland is melting
at .25 millimeters per year.
The ocean fills your boots,

there is too much salt in your food,
and the sandfleas are hopping
on the linoleum.

Lately, you find yourself curling
up into the dark, nesting near
the water’s edge, the place

where your dense bones
park your truck and watch
the ocean jump the harbor’s breakwater again.

What is it that has awakened in you?
Your tremolo wavers
and the frequent hard rains

now sound like deer hooves—a clack and cry harmonic.
You know what I mean by that—
you want to run and fly at the same time.

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This selection comes from The Last Glacier at the End of the World, available from Split Rock Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised in Wrangell, a small island community is Southeastern Alaska. She lives in Wrangell at her family’s fishcamp—Mickey’s Fishcamp. She holds an MFA from the University of Alaska and a PhD in Cross Cultural Studies from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She’s a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQ group on the island. Prescott is also a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi, and writes frequently about Sámi diaspora and climate change in Alaska. She is a two-time recipient of a Rasmuson Fellowship (2015, 2019) and a recipient of the Alaska Literary Award (2017). Prescott is the author of four chapbooks, two full-length poetry books, and a short story collection. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Along with her daughter, Vivian Mork Yéilk’, she writes a column for the Juneau Empire called Planet Alaska. For more information, visit: vivianfaithprescott.com. Twitter: planet_alaska and poet_tweet. Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.