Somewhere Along the Alaskan Coastline
Somewhere along the Alaskan coastline, a glacier calves, and the earth itself groans in pain, feeling every fissure in its frozen expanse. Seabirds scatter into flight as ice tumbles into a pale aqua sea that glows with glacial silt. Eventually the permafrost will melt, the glacier will shrink to nothing, and the monumental collapse of an ice floe into the sea will be relegated to old photos, to nature films. We do not crack so much as we unravel at the seams that bind us. Where is the cruise ship full of tourists, their cameras flashing to capture our great pain? Where is the sea that drowns the part of me that is you, whose waves reach up to embrace the crumbling pieces of our falling love?
Miki Howald writes lyrical essays and prose poems. Her work has been published in Gulf Coast, Like Water Burning, swap/concessions, Ariel, and various online journals and zines. She has performed her work at the 2011 and 2009 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference, Reconstruction Room, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the First Friday Reading Series in Anchorage, AK, and the Quiet Storm café in Pittsburgh. Miki was a semi-finalist in the 2009 and 2006 Guild Complex of Chicago's non-fiction prose contests. She is a former co-organizer, webmaster, and blog writer of the Reconstruction Room reading series in Chicago. Miki earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a BA from the University of Pittsburgh.
