 Welcome to the first Lunch Poems of the Year. It's a real delight to see so many familiar and new faces. My name is Noah Warren, and I'm the coordinator of Lunch Poems. Before we get started, before I introduce our director, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, I'd like to first send out a heartfelt thanks to our sponsors and everyone that makes Lunch Poems possible. First of all, you for being here as the audience, but more specifically to the library, who give us this amazing space, have for 20 years now and provide generous funding to the Dean's Office of Arts and Humanities, who also allow us to keep bringing readers like DG, year after year, and to the Arts Research Center, represented by Beth Pietori here, who is very generously sponsored DG's visit today. They're a great advocate for arts and poetry of all sorts on campus and specifically for native arts. So thank you. And finally, Callie from Pegasus Books is selling books. So if you are moved and I hope you will be, I know you will be, DG's book is for sale, and I'm sure she would be happy to sign. Before we get started, if you could silence your phones and keep in mind that this reading is only the first half of DG's program on campus. Later in the afternoon at 4 p.m., she'll be giving a craft talk. So if your appetite is wedded, it can be further fulfilled then. Without further ado, our professor, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, will introduce DG Alclerk. Thank you, Nara. It would have been kind of amazing if the reading had been yesterday and the FEMA alert had sort of exploded in the middle of all of your phones, but thank you for silencing them today. UC Berkeley sits on the territory of Huichin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Aloni people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band. The land was and continues to be of great importance to Muakma Aloni tribe and other familial descendants of the Verona Band who have been far better stewards than the settlers who have come after. So lucky to have this maker with us here today, DG Alclerk. Her most recent book is called Blood Snow and is available after the reading over there. It's a title that sounds like a surreal lyric image, one you could find in many practitioners' hands and texts, but it's also an all-too-real algae effect that's stained snow, pink or red, and that's not enough for this poet. It also betokens global warming and arctic ice melt in particular as the albedo of snow colored in this way changes how quickly it melts. In that title is the everything of Akpik's project, the celebration of a strange recalcitrant, unexpected beauty wherever one can find it or needs to find it, the intimate knowledge of nature's intricate mechanics and also a sturdy lament for unwanted and imprudent changes in terrestrial system. The poems inventory a biome to conserve it virtually while also remaining unflinchingly open to the material presence of catastrophe. The word, in fact, methane haunts these poems just as it haunts the atmosphere of the world. This leads to a doubled, sometimes riven vision of that world in which the knowledge of how it was confronts the velocity of what it's becoming such that the following line from the poem Anthropocene Years makes too much sense and the line is here, wake up, there, not here. Yet so does the idea of, quote, a vigor 11,500 years old still detectable in that alienated here. The contact zone between enduring landscape and anthroposonic change is the here not here in which these poems sing elemental details and register their disappearance, piling up hyphenated compound nouns and color terms like, quote, sky blue, pink, sky blue, pink, sky blue snow. A dizzying accumulation of monosyllables that seems to want to make things stay through a reemphasis, but that also concedes transformation and precipitation. As does the end of another poem, White Out Polar Bears, which ends this way, I glance across the whiteness to myself where the eye loops from the landscape of self-witness while also transiting racial difference and what it has brought and wrought on the earth and in the water and the skies, including the, quote, frightening acid flakes that give another poem its title, in which all of the sheltering harbor and vulnerability of the present world condenses to a single line break keeps the people in unsafe. To make unsafe a noun in the poem. To turn it into a substance as the verse engems. To make a modifier, a total environmental and social condition is not really to transform the world, but to search for the form and syntax that could accurately hold how we treat the earth and how it responds. Awkwik poems are a searching response to that response. Modeling a fierce and honest musical attention to the earth and the long view of it that such attention requires. Please join me in welcoming D.G. Nanook Awkwik. Thank you. Hi, it's wonderful to be here. Thank you all for coming. I'd like to thank the Berkeley, UC Berkeley for having me, the library for having me, and all the people that are involved in putting together such a wonderful, wonderful program. Noah, thank you for your guidance. Shall we start out? I'm D.G. Nanook Awkwik. I am of the polar bear clan. Nanook is polar bear in my culture and Awkwik is snow owl and snow owl is my father's side of the family or a matriarchal society and so I follow the polar bear clan. As we all know, the polar bears are going, you know, they're going quickly and I'd like to attest to this and to the writing and share some of the words that I've created to exemplify and show what devastation I'm living on at home. This year, which is a very important year, my older brother and my father are wailing captains. They're umalayaks and we have a wailing boat, an umiak that's 60 feet long, carries 15 men and hunts whale for our village. One whale can feed our village. I'm from Barrow and Barrow is the furthest most northern point in North America and we decided this year in our village we're not wailing anymore. It's how quickly they're going. So with that, I'd like to dedicate this to humans and to whales. Forgrass. A toil of one inside me, and I cast a thick sod wall, time out of mind, out of sync, off course. I see forgrass, little blue, little stemmed flowers, light modeled, purple yellow centered star. She and I go there to the egg cortex and nest. We change into her in my parka hood. She and I wear a time meter or surface. Let no one be at the outer corners to measure the nebulous. A timing belt bearing teeth, gauge, turning, rusty sprockets, diamond dust covered and she and I measure and pinpoint the sounding line underneath. The sea depth of her and my childhood is restricted to no particular time. Only emerald green ocean, sea and lake. I see poisonous butter cups, soda ash from ceramics, glass black smooth. I stand to keep time. Anthropocetic seniors. Here Cape Lisbon, or maybe not there. Katowice then. No, new Siberian islands. Not here, not there. Elsewhere, but anywhere. But somewhere like Cape Cholesterol, like White Island, yes, set on the route due north. As my compass taps out of burying in circles, novila zambula, a gyroscope. Here on the Burial Island, Norway. Whether it is warm, here it is choking on acid air. Here, Greenland, Dan Maiden. No, it's disco. Here, Canada, Baffin Island, Grinnell Lake, Minto Inlet. Place fog lenses on telescopic eyes. Here brilliant colors of pollution so high. Here in the melt sun heaving waters of ocean and sea. Here start ending double rate heat to sweat and yet not yet. Here, wake up there. Here, horizon at duck camp. The dog-mind-ghost yapping my name. I did not cry. I just stared like a stone on a river's bottom watching the ice melt on the surface. Spring thaw on the Coalville. I stared until my knuckles were purple, my tongue swollen, my ears deafened by howls, dreaming ixigraq coming for me. Peter, Paul, Johnny, Billy, Edna, like a frozen sheafish in the feeling of cold, the aluminum foil in the filled mortar, it twinges metallic. Pulse in my toes in my Inula spirit, ask me what does it feel like at 60 below? I do not answer. I don't know. And a loose of seal shark patrolling the freshwater sea like a polar ice bear grinding its teeth into seal skull. First an old genetic memory burnishers in the smell of blood, of snow, petrified melt. I candle the liquid mirrored maze, pain rising water levels in salt. I measure my temperature in wind chill factor, dust born from old glacial ice snow melting, eye with cupped hands to mouth to cup to lips, drink the salt sea. Dissolving ocean, I pray for more land, to mend my Malay, fused together by an abatement in the weather. Tell me again what to say. Adoption, copper, coal, oil, oil, oil. Natural gas. I collect the ability to heal the destruction, extract, extract, extract. A whistling buoy, a float alone in spring thaw. Hollow hands. You dig with hollow hands with hammer and tongs, carve out my wrists, my metacarpals, fingers and thumb. At time my song muffles as if snapping your knuckles were deep. The talons of a falcon is a hand. The bird takes flight with messages carried. Underevasher, nanilism, polar bear lost. The little people brought south winds with pollution as the polar thunder starts in the rip crackle roaring across on January 1st, 2018 in Santa Fe, just as Uranus maritones mixing and mingling with man. No fear, dead on blank stairs, and thin bones with thick matted hair, a bear. Bear the beer and the soda cans on the line on the shore. Thunderbirds take flight northwards. Mud, tan, polar bears found. Taken, duckfoot skin, an owl with five outlets, nesting minks caught in a fish trap. A bird egg found in winter, given, and a nupik dictionary left by Simon Tagark Jr. Eyes on the mask left to wear on my head. See what is found. Skinny boned bear. No fear, dead on in the night sky, or struck on the deep web, bear stars still exist. Name the bone pile on the marsh heaving like the Chuck G. C. Pure white ice and arctic arctic air, 50 miles of open water floating. I see a half carcass and marrow bones at five times a black bear, 1,500 pounds and nine feet tall with one swipe of its paw. I'm neck snapped to the flush ice. Cheek, blood, snow. I glance across the whiteness, a radio collared skinny boned, muddy male polar bear. Bones on inner ice, meltwater, tears reflected. No ice, no seal sharks. Warm water fish moving in. Out there, believing a spiritual ruin, a body passes and the dead found a mass-gavaged hock-to-fet lock on these beaches. The body rests on the round patches of dried seagrasses. Out there, the night entrance looms from earthly inward silent escapes like sound shapes of cosmos swirling. A wall of salt-white chance, I tap lightly like an alderfly. Upon cool damp ground, I throw stones half halt. Pebbles quickly flying whenward, re-chaining the light-goed livery, a freehold. I hang on the seaside banister. For here, my ears bleed like a cat's. In the evening, my nose hears instinct. My eyes smell salt. I crouch through the ocean's ocean and waves that fold and spray, fold and spray. Here, in the bone-shackled shells around my flowered-bound hands, tightly held still, my free walk as a beetle across a sidewalk. I find dead spots in the fawn lily, three human heads, dusty, tampered, stilted, light-dried-up blossoms, but black on blue. Out there, dust particles, a somber solar moon waning, a beetle-browed, large dome, ice core wicks the dead, living to a time and hour of melting igloos and ice caves and rising butter clams clamp shut, rotten and rancid. Out there, I find albino black grouse huddled in covens. Here, bull-thistle, in my intestines, toxic shock and fodder in my silk-poked bag, slung over my shoulder, a grimace of a mask peeking at me. And here, harbour seals walk upright, porpoise circle in the screeched whale hides at the back of my mouth in there, unblinking pupils of owls live. There, moon-trips grow dark. Here, the annual growth of a fish scale is 33 inches. Fine debris of rock scatters, bluest eggs of magpies cobalt, enclosed by caribou herds in protection like a nest weaved to the spruce. And here, we polish line and snow our bodies to purify or make free. In here, I peel off a bony cast of my head and temporary loss of my soul-person to now, this freely. I am not woman or man. The corpse is played out before the life. I find finger-fish holes. Here, like cancer in a jar of oil, is $21. A liter of oil might be 10,400,320 years old. I intoned her. I pursed my lips. I am pursued my eye shape. Here, here, here, see again. My covered lid and domed mind hides under the closed eyes and seals warm water fish moving in. Thank you. I'd like to sum up by saying that poetry isn't always beautiful. It is the cringe, the rawness, the fierceness, the stark and naked of us all. It's the real feeling. If I can bring feeling to the word Eskimo, remember me. Remember me. Thank you, D.G. Well, thank you all. And if you were moved again, D.G.'s book is being sold by Kelly from Pegasus up back, and D.G. would love to sign. Looking forward, our next lunch poems will be on November 2nd with Kate Gabriel. But in the meantime, again, D.G. is going to be giving a craft talk at 4 p.m. this afternoon in Hearst Annex D23, unless I'm mistaken. Do we have that number somewhere around here? Well, Hearst Annex D23 let us know if you need help finding that place. We'll be around to help you. If you enjoyed Lunch Poems, there's a sign-up sheet for the email list, and you can also revisit this reading as any reading on our YouTube channel. Thank you all.