Episode #083 Warming - dg nanouk okpik

Connor and Jack explore the poem "Warming" by dg nanouk okpik. They discuss the poem's interplay between intense specificity and figurative language, climate change as context, and the fact that ice worms are really actually real.

More about okpik here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dg-okpik

Warming

By: dg nanouk okpik

She and I make a bladder bag to draw water from the ice trench.

She/I chain stitch/es a skin dressed in oil to make a new pot of soup.

She/I sew/s a badger hair rough around the top of her/my kamiks

to make the steps windward, toward the limits of woman.

She/I eat/s club root and white clover to strengthen her/my silver

body to bear a child. She/I map/s, following 1 degree from the North

Star and 60 degrees from the end of the earth’s axis on rotation

for Ukpeagvik she/I use/s a small arc of ice, cleaving into parts, reduced

to simple curves fitted with serrated edges of white flesh. She/I mold/s

to the fretted neck of frozen water into a deep urn, made like a rock shelter

or a cavern. She/I construct/s a hole on the surface of a glacier formed by melting particles

of roe and pan reservoir dust from a shelter for the ice worms. Because the earth is

molding, burning, laughing, and purging its crust.

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