Cold Creation

By Al Gunby

“Kitsap spuds,” he said,
“Canadian gifts from fifteen thousand years ago,”
and pitched the four-inch stone
into the Hood Canal,
the mile-wide trench
that bears an Admiral’s name.
A massive ice sheet,
five Space Needles high,
had scoured the land and pressed it down,
then headed north with warmer weather,
letting in the sea,
dropping rocks and soil,
making Puget Sound.
“Imagine that”, he said.

Viaduct Ice Chorus

by Janet Knox

The Alaskan Way Viaduct sings a roaring in our ears,
her hoary freight bears down—rebarred and quaking
to crush—we stop our ears at stria screeching to break
something.

Sing a glacial aria. Picture her—she once rode
a surfboard ice floe ripping through solid water slipping
the firn, making breccia wakes, scraping
all matter of chattermarks.

Harmonize a glacier-blue blush—she was whole mother of forward
surge for half an eon, could not be stopped,
shadowed the glacier that swept this same Sound.
Now we cannot hoist her out of her chair.

Aphasia—she forgets the second verse.
Words freeze midbrain, coda becomes hum. She falls
in a crevasse, off-ramps sequestering carbon—so much
concrete we recant, we can’t watch icebergs calving fast ice.

She slows—cowers shifts direction like a white wind rose,
her petals shrivel in frazil.
She lies—this is not the full story.
Her tongue muddles in slush. Albedo lost, all reflection dulls.

Once their song clamored.
Now 99, glacier dwindle in cirques, caught in arête,
retreat since the last ice age, since the last
carbon storm.

Seven-time Pushcart nominee and finalist for the Discovery/The Nation Award, Janet Norman Knox’s poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, 5 AM, Crab Creek Review, Rhino, Bellingham Review, Fourth River, Diner, Seattle Review, Adirondack Review, and Diagram. Her play, 9 Gs and the Red Telephone, appeared in Feminist Studies. She received the Ruskin Poetry Prize (Red Hen Press) and the Los Angeles Review nominated her for Best New Poets. Her chapbook, Eastlake Cleaners when Quality & Price Count [a romance], received the Concrete Wolf Editor’s Award. http://www.rattle.com/ereviews/knoxeastlake.htm Janet collaborates with artists Anne Beffel (Jack Straw Foundation and Duwamish Revealed Grants) and Vaughn Bell (4Culture and Duwamish Revealed Grants) in public art. Janet is an entrepreneur and Environmental Geochemist, her company turning 34.

Al Gunby, a retired nuclear/aerospace engineer, has always admired poets and poetry, but finally jumped in in 2002. His work appeared in Ars Poetica 2013 and for six years has been featured in Poetry Corners, sponsored by Bainbridge Island Arts & Humanities Council.

Table of Contents, Issue #11, Spring 2021