FAIRBANKS By Kent Fielding

  with a line after Bukowski

The swallows are rough today like ingrown toenails

As I wake hung-over again, again in a room I do not

recognize and things missing from the night 

as if someone broke into my head and robbed the house

of all the pictures that hung on the walls,

of all the laughter that clung to the air.

Out the cabin window, light builds and builds

I do not wish to go out. Thin white birches

with blinding green leaves threaten me

with their silence, with their stillness.

Yesterday as the May snow receded back into the sky

And winter traveled far North, I found

A case of beer that had been lost in December

Covered by darkness and ice. Forgotten because

I was drunk and had put it down to pee

Peed and forgot to bring the case inside

Forgot that I had just bought twenty-four more.

Twenty-four more bullets to put into my head.

Yesterday, I brought the re-found treasure inside, 

Spent an afternoon drinking the warm, stale yellow

The taste reminded me of water mixed with mud

I forced myself to drink it, to gulp it down

because there was nothing, and no-one

I loved as much as being alone and being drunk.

Kent Fielding – educator, editor, poet, activist – co-founded White Fields Press and the literary renaissance with Ron Whitehead in 1992. Fielding is an Honorary Kentucky Colonel, a BP Teacher of Excellence, an Alaska Teacher of the Year Finalist, 2021 Alaska Speech and Debate Coach of the Year. He has taught in the Marshall Islands, at Jefferson Community College, University of Alaska Southeast, Mt. Edgecumbe, Skagway High School, and at summer institutes in Turkey and Latvia. Author of a book of poetry, Chief Iffuccan, a chapbook, The Revolution is About to Begin, and a broadside “Museums” (Cheek Press 2023), his work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Asheville Poetry Review, The Jefferson Review, Pavement Saw, Modern Haiku, The Beat Scene, Frisk Magazine, Boog Literature, Night Owl Narrative: A Cajun Mutt Rag, and Tidal Echoes, among others.