Arctic terns pecked the heads of us Temsco girls til we
bled and Jenny wore a helmet to ward them off.
Crush of tourists we turned into boots, jackets,
delivered them, baptized in slick winter gear—
elephantine—to the helicopters waiting to carry them over
fields of fireweed, those six foot spines of flame, to
glaciers. From the air, the ocean, sky, and mountains made
hemorrhagesof blue, and the cavernous azure
ice leaked into lakes. The night we skinny-dipped in it—
jolt to the core—then huddled around the fire
kicking driftwood into the heat, I
lived deeper in my bones than I had before, and when
Maddie asked our biggest fear before we fell asleep under
noonday light at 2 am, I finally
opened the door: that God in his eccentric
panoply of creatures had forgotten my face,
quiet desperation of my breath. But in the morning,
rising to endless light and water, I heard again the
sound a soul makes when it’s filled, a gentle
tenor in the blood. It came and came in
unlikely ways, like the day my favorite pilot called each view
vignette of blue or green, told me in his twenties he
worked in Hollywood, built the set for
Xanadu, that film where Olivia Newton John, forever
young and free, roller skates into ecstasy. Like a wild
zephyr love comes to her. And me. And me.
–
Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s poetry can be found in Western Humanities Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of Sundress’s 2020 Chapbook Prize). She also won New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize and the 2020 Joy Harjo Prize from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.