Cathy Tagnak Rexford

No daylight for two months, an ice chisel slivers frozen lake water refracting blue cinders. By light of an oil lamp, a child learns to savor marrow: cracked caribou bones a heap on the floor. A sinew, thickly wrapped in soot, threads through the meat on her chin: a tattoo in three slender lines. One white ptarmigan plume fastened to the lip of a birch wood basket; thaw approaches: the plume turns brown. On the edge of the open lead, a toggle-head harpoon waits to launch: bowhead sings to krill. Thickened pack ice cracking; a baleen fishing line pulls taut a silver dorsal fin of a round white fish. A slate-blade knife slices along the grain of a caribou hindquarter; the ice cellar lined in willow branches is empty. Saltwater suffuses into a flint quarry, offshore a thin layer of radiation glazes leathered walrus skin. Alongside shatters of a hummock, a marsh marigold flattens under three black toes of a sandhill crane. A translucent sheep horn dipper skims a freshwater stream; underneath, arctic char lay eggs of mercury. Picked before the fall migration, cloudberries drench in whale oil, ferment in a sealskin poke. A tundra swan nests inside a rusted steel rum; she abandons her newborns hatched a deep crimson.

Shoot in 16 mm film, capture her sitting under an olive-green archway. Loop the sound of steel striking glass. When you blink, the camera captures the frame of her kin, walking upside down. Loop the sound of tundra grass sprouting. Her hairline marks her shift        from caribou to woman. Standing in front of three white spotlights the silhouette of five black arrowheads departs from her lips. Splice together her eyelashes and frozen lids        exaggerate the strain of her freckles coiled into song. Inukshuks tumble from the tips of her fingernails guiding the landing strip for twin otters; they watch their children travel to the moon, or perhaps they erase our oiled webs. Chart sixteen luminaries into the Beaufort Sea. Wait.     Wait.        Wait. The shutter will remember their white crested etchings. They resurface in the lyric of your documentary.