From “White Alice Changes Hands”

This poem is an excerpt from a long poem about the White Alice Communications System installed throughout the American Arctic during the Cold War, and specifically about the decommissioned cold war era Distant Early Warning stations and tactical infrastructure that continues to dominate and erode/weather in the landscape of the subarctic. Throughout the poem, the onomatopoeic word in the King Island Inupiaq dialect for clock reappears: sassaq, set against the translation of one of the tundra bird's songs into English (“Are you yet in a green, green tree?”).