Annie Wenstrup

Ggugguyni Transcribes the Archive
as Diviner

What treasure can I offer the auger?
Clear water in a silver bowl. Bird bones,
feathers, a red bead. My open hand,
palms offering copper coins, tin nails, oil
paints. The Hubble Telescope’s* first picture.
Yesterday’s paper, horoscope circled.
Lines, an ant’s path, The magician’s card
deck, ends tapered. My first memory. Mist.

This is what I learned of the future:
a red salmon, her scale blushed belly,
her silvered cheeks above her gills.
Her gills like a door in a lift-the-flap book.

Here, hook the crook of your index
finger and pull. There’s the lure.

 

* Earthdate 12.25.2021: On TV, a NASA scientist tells the Hubble
goodnight sweetheart, I love you. Meanwhile, I cry. I don’t
know if I cry for the man, or the Hubble, or for myself, for all of us
far from home. Meanwhile, a Star Trek Voyager rerun begins.

Ggugguyni Transcribes the Archive
as Land

Erosion stains the green grass to water.
Its science.* Take a beaker of liquid,
measure it. Now place a metal washer
within. The difference between waterlines
(after-before) yields the volume displaced.
Only, no beaker’s large enough to contain
home. And if it was, there is no god
with strong, steady hands to hold it. Or
if there is, he is pre-Archimedean, indifferent
to measurement. In my reoccurring dream
the water rises in my living room. Still,
salmon, their bodies like spades, dig upstream
to spawn. Unaware they’re ascending
what was once a bluff. Still, they swim.

 

* Earthdate 9.26.2022: NASA unbinds an asteroid from orbit.
In the undoing NASA hopes they’ll rescue future earthlings.
We won’t go the way of dinosaurs. Nor will we become the moon.
Meanwhile, the permafrost gentles. Meanwhile, my home.

Ggugguyni Transcribes the Archive
as Memory*

Dream: I’m canoeing through my living room.
Here silt unsettles its fine bed,
milks the waters grey. A fast flume propels
me—a brown reed like a loom’s shed stick—past
empty photo frames, the TV set,
my grandma’s crewel-worked chair. I want so much

from this place. The black audiocassette
with your voice unspooling. The China hutch,
its lock undone. My hungry hands hope
to palm a river rock. I’d adopt its grit-smoothed
edge. But my hands won’t find purchase here.
My hands stretch, the memories dissolve.
There’s only glacial loess in the water.
Empty handed, still, I beg the augur. 

 

* Stardate 2373: Caught in a time-paradox, Commander
Chakotay unbinds an asteroid from the space-time
continuum. In the undoing, he hopes he rescues his shipmates.
Instead, dozens of civilizations wink out of existence.

 

Annie Wenstrup lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. A summer 2022 Stonecoast graduate, she is also a Smithsonian Arctic Studies Fellow, an Inaugural Indigenous Nations Poetry Fellow, and a Storyknife Fireweed Fellow. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Ilanot Review, After, Palette, and Ran Off with the Star Bassoon.

ISSN 2472-338X
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