Abigail Chabitnoy is a poet of Unangan/Sugpiaq descent. She earned her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University and was a 2016 Peripheral Poets fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Nat Brut, and Red Ink, and she has written reviews for Colorado Review, the Volta blog, and The Courier, a publication of the Wolverine Farm Press and Bookstore based in Fort Collins, CO, where she currently resides.

before there was a train

I built my home

from animal skins

and crooked bones

far from the rotting boat

They took

the wrong shape

Sod not ice not body

not Other

Nikiiq

Engluq nikiimek patumauq

The wrong tongue

By the time you read this

I will have forgotten how to say

the house is covered with sod

or home

Part of me wishes it had sunk

it sank

it is sinking

but these sentences have not been written

Only, allrani suu’ut caqainek pukugtaartut

sometimes people salvage some stuff

fox hunting i

Last winter I [had a thought, go out], ii hunt foxes.

iii

, and, having come

to the opening of a little hut , I entered it

and apparently there was a fox there I didn’t

see , but when it was seen and pointed to me

I could shoot

I ran

, but running after it I

finally lost my breath

under a rock,

pulled from there

, then I walked and walked

, and seemed to

be a fox but didn’t see , but

started to run again, shot , so

I came back two .

After I went to sleep,

the day got up again

to hunt fox [.] I passed

to the other side

one fox

up the hill

thinking how I was

a piece

daylight the hill

the isthmus,

the north side,

a storm

the sea,

the canyon

a fire a little cave

the night

entered

until the morning,

the wind

a pit in the snow

slept in until the morning, daylight

descended

from

foxes

and steam

and went home

_________________________

i Told by Stepan Prokopyev, Attu, August, 1909. Cylinders 25 and 26 (four minutes and forty-five seconds). Transcribed and translated into Eastern Aleut by Jochelson and Yachmenev with the help of Stepan Prokopyev, Umnak, 1910. Of the paired lines, the first is Attuan, the second Eastern Aleut. The written text differs in several spots from the cylinders. New York Public Library Manuscript 61.

ii Contamination (or copying mistake).

iii Some words missing.

re-articulation

With our homes we buried our children

with our hopes we buried them

that no one would find

Now there are no rooms for children

for burying

Michael go down the shore

you will find the fish

the fish

that will make you home

[Michael II who stayed in Alaska—

occupation: fisherman

—killed a shark on Wood Island

and brought it to Miss Hannah.]

Michael go down the shore

Reach with your arms in the water until you feel the body

Slide your hands into its non-lungs

and pull its head from the water

pull

You are not the fish that swims in the maw

[Not many people consider the shark

a fish.]

You are the maw

the bridge many-teethed

and hungry

The way to the body

is through the body

through blood

to the heart—

Michael of-the-water

She gets her power from the water

She removed her ribs and

buried them

in a row

, having dreamt she would lose them

She slept and dreamed

in her dreams

she couldn’t breathe

She couldn’t breathe

in her dreams

there was no air

—

She woke to find her chest

was sand

her ribs were

rock

her lungs fire

weeding

through the

faults

Her body sand

was baking

She was baking in the sun

her body

was

in her belly

hard

there was fire

—

She became hard

so she crawled to the sea and dipped her glass hands

in the water

In the water her hands became soft

and pliant

She dipped her body in the water

she pulled the water through her heart

through her lungs

into her belly

—

In the water she could move

freely

but above the water

she was hard and hot and could not

move

above the water

She was a red mouth a wound

spitting fire

must be reshaped—

the body

depends