We take the train overnight, sleeping in stacks
three high like firewood, our bodies
ghosted by motion. Refusing to believe
the earth could be still, we hike into night,
through woods stunted from huddling
through months of night.
It’s summer, and the calendar
ticking off days is as meaningless as a clock counting seconds.
The water in the sky reflects onto the water on the ground.
We can’t find our grounding. We find the white ghost
wing of a ptarmigan, caught by fox and winter.
A wolverine will take a reindeer,
and another, and another, for the love
of the kill, like ice chewing through rock. We can hear
the crunch of bone beneath our feet, beneath ground.
We soak our feet in a pool and fish chew
our skin. Annika catches one, because sometimes
destruction is like that, sometimes it can be caught,
a wolverine skin in a yurt.
I have a picture of you, Annika,
standing on a mountain in the Arctic, you are the top
of the top of the world, sky around your shoulders
like a pelt.