Elizabeth Bradfield grew up in Tacoma, Washington, and has since claimed Cape Cod and Alaska as home. She is the author of Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008) and Approaching Ice (Persea Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have been published in such journals as The […]
Because this life, this alarm clock time card percolator direct deposit income tax stop light seems vast and blank and numbing. Tell me secret orchids hide between the black rock and the ice. Tell me a wild bird sings deep in the crevasses, wingstrokes cracking air. Tell me there’s a surface […]
Come back safely with all your gloves intact and your rolls of slide film finished. Come back with your glasses unbroken, my love, your desire for ice and ringed seal quenched. You’ve pointed out enough ptarmigan, hidden but for their black eyes in the drifts. You’ve lectured enough to the curious, let them go […]
For a day he sailed through bergs and along a face of ice. Land? The bellies of penguins, when slit, scattered stones on the deck, a granite morse that said rock grounded what they passed. Adélie Land, he called it. Named not for patron or ruler or favored lieutenant, but wife. … an act […]
Ice is not land, so how to claim it? How to mark it owned without thatched roofs, artifacts from conquered tribes, quaint yeomen tilling non-native crops on the annexed shore? The planes Passat and Boreas were catapulted from the chill deck of the Schwabenland into the frigid, uncharted air […]
Muttered in bunks, bent to the capstan’s spokes, nightly whispered after exchange of course and speed at watch-shift, What will he look like frostbit? Son of the tropics, how will his dark blood fare? But once on the ice, once our hoods were drawn and hoar had coweled our features, once my broad nose […]
Leave your reindeer bag, damp and moldering, and slide into mine. Two of us, I’m sure, could warm it, could warm. Let me help you from your traces, let me rub what’s sore. Don’t speak. Your hair has grown long in our march, soft as my wife’s. Keep your beard turned toward the tent’s silk, […]
I won’t write you that voice, piggy, crass forged by salt & cold & isolation. Filed to edge by time-wrung, absence-wrought rasping or, if not those, by what made you endure. I know we’re bad luck on boats, women, worse on ice, too humid for this hoar. And you hate my pen tracking through […]