• Carlie Hoffman

• POSTCARD FROM ALASKA

•  
• By February I eat the last cut
• of whale frozen in a plastic bag.
•  
• The clouds above Barrow swell. Blackbirds
• squat among telephone wires
•  
• like stoics and I have forgotten
• the procedure of prayer. My hands
•  
• still my hands, the shape they make so my mouth
• warms them. Interchangeable to the scene
•  
• where I hold a half-dead gull, oil already
• corroding its nerves. Parts of its skull
• no longer light up.
•  
• People, too, contain a dangerous spill
• inside them: a transmitter out
• of date, whole spheres submerged
•  
• in serotonin.
• If I can believe in electricity, I can believe the dead
• still live somewhere—
•  
• a zip code to a dim, immutable
• breathing. A voice calling out
• This is not the body you longed for—
•  
• Even the crows who stalk power
• lines have flown from someplace else.

CARLIE HOFFMAN holds a BA in literature from Ramapo College of New Jersey and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She received the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cider Press Review, Narrative, and Nashville Review.