In the Antarctic Circle

Dennis James Sweeney

• Publisher: Autumn House Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781938769733
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía

This collection addresses issues of identity as two people find themselves living in an uncommon landscape. Through hybrid narrative prose poems, Hank and an unnamed narrator try to navigate their relationship and understand their identities amid a landscape that offers them almost nothing. The continent at first seems empty, but something emerges in the vacuum of Antarctica. The narrator's gender skips and changes, and the characters' self-awareness grows into a sort of horror. Dennis James Sweeney's poems consider the fullness of emptiness, revealing attempts to love and grow when surrounded by a white and frigid landscape that seems to go on forever.The space of these poems is something beyond the Antarctic of scientific exploration, the icy outpost that has served for so long as a masculine proving ground for polar explorers. This is the Antarctica of domestic disharmony, of love amid loneliness, where two people encounter themselves in the changeless breadth at the end of the world. In the Antarctic Circle is the winner of the Autumn House Press 2020 Rising Writer Prize in Poetry.
 

69°22’S 139°1’E

Every night we go around the table and give thanks. For the sky, for the snow, for the walls, for the slippers between us and the floor, for death, which will come soon enough, for the penguins, which at least are free—

In the Antarctic Circle thanks is bitterness, flung at what we don’t have.

But tradition dies hard. We swivel our heads to take in the trappings of isolation and find that even they are sparse. Thanks for white. Thanks for winter. For the hole in the harpoon gun where the harpoon fits.

Thanks for the pits where our eyes go, for where breath travels, for the ducts that allow us to pass daily out of ourselves. Thanks for the rain, which high above us turns to snow. A shy gift lies in it: the certainty of eventual thaw.

LEFT BLANK

THIS PAGE

FREEZES OVER

65°16’S 103°6’E

First, the little toe. The big one next. Everything between, sufferance upon sufferance. Our pleasure shivers toward the cluttered sea.

My father told me once, while my mother shook her head: Tickling is nothing less than a gesture at the beyond. Do you hear that? God’s salesman knocking at the door!

Hank shrieks and kicks at me. I know what his body is saying: There are more empty spaces than there are ways to fill. But that’s an inborn fault. I don’t stop. We don’t have an uncle yet, and I’m not sorry.

Windows—we don’t even have those. I’ll stop when I can see the snow from inside the snow.

64°56’S 63°45’W

Our nerves have migrated to the southern cities. Populations have doubled: children of nerves.

The southern cities burn, smell like singed hair, torn car leather, speeches in favor of God forgotten and submitted to the ideology of distraction. Scroll and scroll.

If you know ink, remind your brother of it.

As his sister, your job is to collect the feelings and hold them under the snow. In time, they take on the characteristics of the uncharacteristically abandoned.

You like me, the feelings say, numb. You love me.

Do not believe them. In the sky they are driving to work, raining gas. Our synapses call out to each other the way mirrors call out to the lost. If the southern cities ever stop burning, their reward will be one mute century and a single year, following that, of nakedness.

But we can see what they are even without that last year: stalks of itching hay stuffed to fill a pair of white jeans.

74°35’S 111°0’W

The only way to get to the Dark Sector is to trudge. Titanium fills your cheeks. Formlessness tackles you and rubs snow in your eyes until you can see her. The dim promise of a new year lingers on the horizon but you’d rather someone cut a hole in the sun and fished you out, fed you to their family of five, and loved you for what you are, a mass of mostly bone. What flesh you have you owe to the winter. Your shape is the shape of stone. Your smile is someone else’s whim. Your trust is back with Hank. He hovers above it, as brittle as a shoreline. The living room lifts him up with its thick gray fingers and plucks his ribs out, one by one. My hands are shaking at the thought of him suspended there. You think the cold is cold. Emptiness is only a beginning. Emptiness is a simple, ready receptacle.

66°15’S 121°30’E

All the earth’s bats are right-side up, sleeping off the fight. They turn white in their hibernation. They won’t speak and don’t have the language. But they are somewhere near, I know.

Sweep the ceiling. Sweep the house. Sweep the table. Hank’s hair. In our jumpsuits. Where we sweat. Our stone of a bed. I’ll turn to the ice soon. Sweep it. Push away the sugar-snow until I find their den of warmth and dark, leathery life.

Still the bats won’t come. Their peeping eyes are shut tight for once. They wait it out.

They know I’ll cave first.

Hank risks glances at me. He’s afraid to raise his hands, to warn me against the collapse we both know is calling.

I’ll bite him. He knows I will.

Yes: That’s the day the bats will wake.

66°13’S 110°36’E

I believe in Antarctica the way I believe in God’s white palm. The way it brims with snow. The way the night ice is new to the morning ice. I believe that the moon shines down on a union, that somewhere in this tundra two are frozen into one.

Some day: I believe in that day.

In my life, a desperate insect drags lint across the living room floor.

Not a single memory fills me. I remember the beach. The flags we covered ourselves in. The beer we drank. No snow. The sky pretended to go on forever but stopped just beyond the eyes.

Forever was only an idea then, something someone said to someone and both quickly forgot. Waiting there for us.

THIS PAGE

DISCOVERS

THINNESS

A BREACH

90°0’S 0°0’W

The South Pole shudders at our approach.

In the Antarctic Circle, humans transmit like radio waves. Like

lightning through water.

The South Pole is not in fact a pole.

The bald bottom of existence, shivering and doubting.

Darling—as in polarity.

Without some deep-set hopes and/or beliefs, what is your

purpose in coming?

The si...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 74°0’S 108°30’W
• 66°30’S 109°30’E
• 67°55’S 44°38’E
• 66°20’S 124°38’E
• 74°50’S 132°0’W
• 75°18’S 19°0’W
• 72°3’S 102°20’W
• 70°40’S 8°16’W
• 66°27’S 91°54’E
• 76°58’S 148°45’W
• 70°45’S 11°38’E
• 75°30’S 107°0’W
• 64°54’S 63°37’W
• 74°45’S 120°0’W
• 77°0’S 152°30’W
• 72°45’S 88°50’W
• 69°45’S 39°5’E
• 71°35’S 0°30’E
• Snow: A Definition
• 67°31’S 61°37’E
• 62°57’S 60°38’W
• 66°12’S 136°11’E
• 77°8’S 154°0’W
• 69°45’S 71°0’E
• 70°5’S 65°40’E
• 76°50’S 155°0’W
• 71°15’S 163°0’E
• 62°27’S 60°20’W
• 68°35’S 77°58’E
• 63°22’S 56°58’W
• 70°45’S 12°30’E
• Nothing: A Definition
• 70°38’S 71°58’E
• 74°15’S 125°0’W
• 75°14’S 45°45’W
• 73°30’S 96°0’W
• For Those Who Have No Preferences
• 69°22’S 139°1’E
• 65°16’S 103°6’E
• 64°56’S 63°45’W
• 74°35’S 111°0’W
• 66°15’S 121°30’E
• 66°13’S 110°36’E
• 90°0’S 0°0’W
• 67°28’S 61°41’E
• 78°30’S 61°0’W
• 77°7’S 158°1’W
• 64°43’S 62°41’W
• 64°44’S 62°37’W
• 75°37’S 132°25’W
• 69°57’S 38°45’E
• 77°31’S 167°9’E
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author