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Suturing A shrew moves in moonlight,tracking across the broken snow. You have felt this small, a lone heart pounding in the darkness.Claim your trail. Open the frozen meadow, like the shrew.As it rediscovers home, it sutures all things together. Power…

  Migration As you grasped the bony curve, lifting it from the riverbank into the shifting, slanting light, it became the most beautiful thing you had ever seen. An antler, dropped by passing caribou, pressed cool and coarse within your…

Ally   The day you ran from the moose, lurching off the trail to crouch behind trees,   everything changed. I don’t mean you were trampled — outside of your mind, that is — you know, the way people are…

Signature   We’ve seen them too, the striations. Those lines in the rocks, glacial grooves cut mostly parallel like cambium, or teeth, broken here and there by chattered debris.   In snow and willow we watch you kneel, then squat…

Ground  Does it bother you, the grinding? Teeth marks left on bones. The tideline’s broken shells. The ground, subducting. We could call it entropy, a shame, a disaster.We could focus on fault lines and fear — there’s plenty to go…

Handler It was winter, and snowdrifts covered the frozen fens. Dogs, harnesses, gangline, sled. In a rush of steaming yips and howls  you pulled the hook, and  ran free.   The dogs quieted, tuglines taut. The sled creaked and hummed…

Termination Dust   You stared in silence  at the MRI, at the shadowy cavitation of a patient’s brain.  It was progressing, this unknown process, at breathtaking speed. Your team had tossed every life raft, every throw rope overboard, and watched…

Affirmation   When the sockeye come in, choking the riffles with their crimson bodies, flashing their fins with effort  and instinct, we push through the alder and into the river to sit among their fading stories like patient, glacial erratics.…

Pingo Look with me, it said, across this ice-patterned ground, past the frost boils, the polygons, the scouredshield rock. Relax. Let the wind lift this top casing, this skin of sphagnum and sedge. It scatters easilyamong the waving cottongrass, beneath…