Joan Naviyuk Kane

A Few Lines With Monique Sanchez

Of course, I have a question more pressing but—
did the thyme survive the first deep freeze and snow?

And of course, there were sirens when I thought of you,
about the quadruple entendre of shots across the bow
and thus, was visited in an epiphany by Barbara Johnson

incarnate who, like you, reminds me to be aware
of my proximity to myself at all times. No gold here,

I heard. It could have been Z. atricapilla, its summer
thrum dimmed by gloom and calm that escapes me
now in October, the precursor to the dark winter

before the bright one that stirs when the light
blitzes back at the turn of the year. If only impaired

while permitted to be so all morning—I tried to train
various vines to climb and flower. If only I’d burnt
the birch branches I gathered, if only some last light

thronged the trees and interpreted green as green though—
green thought, though green, thyme-leaved, thyme-fed.

Joan Naviyuk Kane's "A Few Lines With Abigail Chabitnoy," "A Few Lines With Sherman Alexie," and "A Few Lines With Monique Sanchez" can be read in the print edition of The Arkansas International 4.

Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s
Igloo, Alaska. She raises her sons in Anchorage and teaches in the lowresidency
MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
Her fifth book, Sublingual, is forthcoming in 2018.