Jessica Ramer
Maxine in Alaska
[First Cruise]
Not quite twenty, she sails from Seattle to Anchorage.
Officers assign shipboard duties to military wives.
Her job is to balance on a rolling deck,
watch waves for enemy submarines.
[Anchorage]
False-front bars like movie set saloons
line pot-holed streets, their peeling paint
grey like tire tracks imprinted in melting snow.
As she is driven to the base, she brushes away tears.
[Base Roads
Gloved hands grip the wheel. She bites
her lip as she drives to work in darkness,
braking for stray dogs and moose.
Tires wrapped in snow chains slide on ice.
[Office Work]
Her boss, a bird colonel, suspends
sweet potato plants from his office ceiling.
She waters the only green she sees for six months,
stashes his brass watering can under her desk.
[Non-Commissioned Officer Meal Plan]
Moose meat simmers for days in the electric skillet.
Although it is tough and gamy, she welcomes
this free food given by airmen hunting on weekends.
It supplements an enlisted man’s meager budget.
[Homesteading]
Resting on cement blocks, the clapboard house
provides a den for a hibernating brown bear.
It stirs when children make too much noise.
“Shhh. You’ll wake the bear,” parents whisper.
[A Rumor of War]
Khrushchev bangs his shoe on the table. Elmendorf AFB
prepares for war. Too afraid to go to bed, she falls
asleep in her chair. At dawn, she opens one eye.
Then the other. She looks outside. There is still an outside.
[Heat Wave]
Summer sun lingers above the horizon until ten.
Starved for light after winter’s darkness,
She stands outside in her magenta swimsuit,
plugs her iron into the porchlight socket.
[Twenty-one, Trapped, and Pregnant]
One week before her due date, March storms pile
snow against the door. Shovel-wielding airmen dig her out.
She fears being snowed in when the baby comes. Jim Joyce says,
“Don’t worry. If I can load bombs, I can catch a baby.”
[Ersatz Milk]
Rows of blue and red cartons fill the freezer—
frozen condensed milk, cheaper than whole milk
shipped by barge from Seattle. Fifty years later,
She still insists that it tasted good.
[Winter]
Housewives bundled in parkas and galoshes
trudge across the ice-coated quadrangle,
stop at Mary’s house for their morning beer.
Darkness makes you drink, they all say.
[Power Failure]
Electricity goes out—along with heat.
She bundles her children in snow suits,
take them into bed—along with Yogi, the dog,
who bears the gift of body heat.
[Radar Operators]
Men from the archipelago of radar stations
facing Siberia descend on the muddy town.
Broken whiskey bottles litter downtown streets,
glittering in brief hours of daylight.
[Feral Dogs]
Pets abandoned by transferred owners
form packs roaming remote corners of the base.
Hunger lures them to apartment garbage cans.
Airmen hunt them down with Springfield rifles.
[Evacuation Drill]
Military wives and children ride in trucks down
gravel roads to a remote camp stocked with K-rations.
Canvas teepees promise privacy for latrine users—
until helicopters hover above open roofs.
[Spring Thaw]
A bear paces outside the city’s only movie theater.
Dozens of patrons walk backwards through the doors.
Anchorage’s only newspaper records the event:
“Bear Goes to the Movies.” Which movie, it didn’t say.
[Maternity Clothes]
“Dan, hold the baby,” she hisses at her husband,
who stares, unhearing, into the distance.
Her homemade maternity skirt falls off.
In church. On Easter Sunday.
[Christmas Eve]
Climbers disappear in the Chugach mountains.
Blinded by snow, the search and rescue plane’s
pilot hits a slope, killing all aboard. Widows bear
cupcakes frosted red and green to the children’s party.
[Security Breach]
Eskimos kayak across the imaginary line
dividing Russian and American waters,
trade seal meat, outboard motors, and furs.
Khrushchev and Eisenhower ignore this security threat.
[The Alcan Highway]
Pregnant again, she bumps down the Alcan Highway in a camper
reeking of propane and dirty diapers. Destination: Florida,
fresh milk, and cockroaches bigger than hummingbirds.
She arrives two months before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Jessica Ramer is a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has appeared in South 85 and The Keats Letters Project. She was a summer 2017 resident at the Alderworks Alaska Writers & Artists Retreat.
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