Exhibit D: Un-sent Memo, and: Ghost Pixels

Exhibit D: Un-sent Memo, and: Ghost Pixels Annie Wenstrup (bio) Exhibit D: Un-sent Memo We both agree the problem is death. Last month I attended a conference.There someone displayed a photo of thousandsof bison skulls abandoned on the ground. Today a woman told me her villagewon't fish this fall. Salmon no longerreturn. Instead, another community will fishthen share their harvest so everyone may eat. Last week I read an article lamenting retiredairplane livery. The plane was painted to looklike a salmon flying through the sky. I have yet to read about the fish that willbe flown from Bristol Bay to the communitiesalong the Yukon River. Last week I read an article. It statedour bodies store microplastics from sippycups, GladWare, and disposable sporks. Always, I've known I embody that which harms me. Last month a friend showed me her beaded earrings.She'd backed them with home-tanned moosehide. She taught me to take the leftover scrapsof hide and to return them to the fireweed and willow. Here's what I wish I'd said at our last meeting:The problem, I think you'll agree,is how accumulation propels us toward harm. [End Page 89] After our last meeting: I left work and saw the tarot cardreader. She drew the ten of swords.I saw the swords impale a bison; the hilts raisedover the body like crosses over a grave. Every time we meet, there's always the problemwith image: it perpetually appears in the present tense. [End Page 90] Ghost Pixels I've archived beauty all my life.News anchors introduce blue womenand blue girls into my home. Their faces imprint on my eyes. Their ghosts floatthrough my mind. The anchor's voice echoesin my sleep. It cries missing, scandal, dead. No corpses are displayed on screen. Deadgirls and women are not art. Lifeobserves the living. Still, death echoes behind blue smiles. Girls become women,transfix their bodies into moths. They float,open and shut their wings, their faces. The TV screens broadcast their faces.They smile and wave even in death.Their bodies move like buoys floating across sets. A story, never their lives,breaks like waves. Anchors place womenon ticker-tape shoulders that echo the news. The newscaster's voice echoesmissing, scandal, dead as screens shuffle faces.How beautiful, how lovely the women are. If missing, I hope they're not dead.When they die, we dissect their livesinto made-f or-TV docudramas like bodies preserved in formaldehyde. Blond hair floatson screen. Pale, blue-eyed women echohere. Some say it's an aesthetic choice in life [End Page 91] to choose who echoes and who to efface.Sometimes I envy the beautifully seen deadwomen—I a green woman among blue women. It's not that I want to live as a blue woman.I would not spend my life floatingbehind a screen. I do not wish for death. It's only I've never heard an echoof anything but blue. This silence effacesgreen memories and hollows my life. Absence becomes my body: a bell echoes another'sstory. Ring it. Ring it. How else can I facewhat's become of my silence. [End Page 92] Annie Wenstrup Annie Wenstrup lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Nimrod, Palette, and POETRY. She is an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow and an Inuit Art Quarterly Art Writing Fellow. She has also received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, and Storyknife. Copyright © 2023 Middlebury College

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