SLICK
Vivian Faith Prescott
a
right hand pointing
chapbook
2nd edition
copyright 2010, 2025 by Vivian Faith Prescott
Photo by Vivian Faith Prescott
Acknowledgements
A version of "Raven Addresses Trickery" was published in Copperfield Review.
The first edition of this online chapbook was published by White Knuckle Press. It was selected for publication by Howie Good and Dale Wisely.
This is the 2nd Edition of SLICK, my first ever published. Before SLICK's publication in 2010, I'd been afraid to send my work to literary journals. I was afraid of rejection, so my work hid in notebooks. Somehow, I found a group of indie poets online—like Howie Good—who were taking risks and publishing works in online literary journals with the strangest names. Then I discovered Dale Wisely's and Howie Good's White Knuckle Press, which gave me the courage to send my prose poems out. For some reason these poems about Alaska and our relationship with oil were accepted for publication. All it takes is for someone to believe in you. I'm proud of this little chapbook.
1968: Oil Discovered in Alaska
Storyteller: In alluvial fans, it was trapped 360 million years. The sea advanced, mud stone deposited, then heated. We burned oil shale. Our elder woman tended lamps: a moss wick, blubber scraps. We believe misery is a woman without a lamp. We buried her with a lamp on her grave.
In his canvas tent, the geologist reads his notes: Cretaceous Schrader Bluff formation, Ungu Sands. He eats C-rations, reads Call of the Wild.
The storyteller ends his story: "Winter has just begun, but now I have chewed off part of it." Out on the tundra, a soapstone lamp still burns.
The Cost of ANCSA
When ANCSA was enacted in 1971, five Southeast Alaska communities—Haines, Tenakee Springs, Petersburg, Wrangell, and Ketchikan—were excluded from corporation status and therefore were not granted title to any lands, including traditionally inhabited lands
—Sealaska Corporation.
Revolution is all about one dollar for two brownies, rubber boots used one fishing season, a $500 Bingo. Revolution is Grandpa sold his village truck in order to rent a car in Seattle, drove to D.C. All that money the town raised making less noise than $3 in dimes, $7.50 in quarters. What does it matter? Enough for gas and a ferry ticket home only to be declared—The Landless—people with no land, no settlement. Someone forgot to add our towns to paper, playing that old shell game hoping to make us vanish because they're still using invisible ink.
*Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) helped pave the way for the Alaska Pipeline.
These Old Jokes
Two linguists walk into a bar. One calls it Kootéeya, one says Totem: same name, same word, low man, top man—all the jargon piles up here.
*
Two men walk into a bar. One is an oil man, one is an old man. The oilman’s words are slick, thickening down Grandfather's throat. Grandfather sells the back lot off our home for $600.
*
My sister and brother-in-law walk into a deal buying auntie and uncle’s bar. Say they’ll preserve our heritage; keep all the same jokes in the family.
Living by a Tank Farm
Cradle Song
The fuel man’s yelling again, 3:00 a.m., a January night at 10 below, Put out your goddamn woodstove, it’s sparking the sky. You’ll blow up the town like the 4th of July. Our backyard, the black sludge dump where dead cats seep in soppy mud holes. And every night so far, I sing to the marrow of our tomorrows, to my drowsy children—Don’t let your tiny red chambers weep into your colorless stem-celled dreams. Spin-dizzy in the sweet threshold of this benzene lullaby—Go to sleep little children, go to sleep.
Please Stay Where
You Are
While I pull the measuring tape the length of your mobile home, across the dip in the linoleum floor, down the hall, stringing its flat tongue past your carboning furnace, and out the back door in order to measure the circumference of the oil company's storage drums towering in your back yard. Let me measure how deep the oil sludge, how thick the fumes in your house, how flammable the benzene in your cells, how deep the oilman's pockets, so they’ll possess a knowledge base—just in case, we must measure you, Again-and-Again-and-Again-and-Again.
Pipeline Boom Town
4th of July
A thousand miles from anywhere, the parade rolls through town. Egg toss, log rolling, a drawing to win a Lund skiff and a 25 hp Evinrude. Auntie's smoking at a corner table in the Totem Bar and Uncle is in town with a hefty wallet. Money to fly Big Macs in from Juneau. Money to saw logs for the house. Money for the divorce, money for marriage. And tonight we sip root beer from the hospital auxiliary booth and dance in the street in 11:00 p.m. daylight waiting for the darkness, waiting for fireworks to blast against the mountains.
Hitch
Two weeks on. Two weeks off. Sleeping in a dorm. Sharing a room. Cleaning toilets for twelve bucks an hour. See a movie. Work out in the gym. Twinkies and Coke from the spike room. Mealtimes: 24 hrs all-you-can-eat. Friday: steak and shrimp. Good communication and interpersonal skills. Ability to prioritize multiple tasks. Must observe and follow all company and client rules and policies. End of shift: In the dark on the front porch in my Woolrich parka I'm smoking a cigarette and naming words for snow: aniu, nutabaq, qiqsruqaq, sitxiq, qatiqsubniq, auksalaq, apun, qannik, apuyyaq, natibviksuq, aqixuqqaq, pukak.
Raven Addresses Trickery
This whole day have I followed in the rocks
And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape…
—William Butler Yeats
You cannot conceal yourself in a new sea, cruising your Slow-Speed Sulzer, black gold in your hull. I detect a sheen trailing behind court appeals and tarballed plea agreements. I sense your fold-over, your camouflage beneath $30 million in repairing slop-tanks. Soon, I will hurl the sun at your metamorphosis, your double-hulled contortion; peck at the new name on your bow—The Sea River Mediterranean, until your shamed myth flakes from your skin, your hull rusts, transforming you into scrap—an end-of-life vessel “fetched up hard aground.” Then I will expose the shape-shifter as you really are—the Exxon Valdez.
*The 'fold over' is a form of shape-shifting technique when new flesh forms over the original form.
Response Teams
Naked Island: Workers in red and yellow raincoats and white hardhats, walk with high pressure, hot water hoses, spraying sludge. Some use buckets and shovels. Some stand weeping. Nearby, she holds a dead murrelet in her hands, tarballs at her feet.
Back home, Grandmother takes out the Sea Grizzly Chilkat robe from her cedar chest, a blanket that took her two years to weave. She wraps it around her shoulders and turns up the radio. She dances to a new song: 987-foot tank vessel Exxon Valdez, 11 million gallons, oil slick, over 3,000 square miles, 350 miles of beaches.
Social Engineering
To my son upon graduating with a degree in engineering and getting a job working for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska.
Sit at your desk. Feel your black ink pen ooze its slick oil on paper. Forget how the knife slices into the deer’s abdomen. Know Senators' phone numbers. Forget the movement of riptide. Know Roberts Rules of Order. Forget light shifting across petroglyphs. Know how to give presentations. Forget the story of porcupine and beaver. Know how your tie wraps around your neck. Forget the way uncle taught you to drum. Know land settlements and claims. Know how the tundra bogs down with the weight of your desk, how everything you’ve known pitches forward and now moves in only one direction.
October Checks
October checks meet on the ferry boat heading to Juneau. We'll shop at Costco for double-sized shampoo, four packs of toilet paper, a bundle of frozen hamburger patties the size of your forearm. We chat about the fat, slick oil in our purses, the full tank of heating fuel, two months back due electric bill, a greasy cafeteria burger, a movie in Juneau, dinner back home, and paying cousin's overdue boat stall rent; maybe a new beaded barrette and a few baggies of black seaweed.
* Each October, Alaska residents get their share of oil revenues with a permanent fund dividend check.
Transients
At the window in the bar overlooking the bay, stretch your neck back to Bligh Reef, where you worked spring of '89. See killer whales: sleek black canoes, cruising through water. Twenty five or more rounded the point like a whale highway and last in line, a towering dorsal fin like huge sail on a boat. Now, walk along petroglyph beach, see only shadows. In grooved rock, trace a killer whale fin with your finger. Remember his fin collapsing, lesions on his skin. Pack for the next job: your hazmat certificate, your rubber boots. Carry his story to the Gulf.
Vivian Faith Prescott
Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised in Wrangell, Alaska, Kaachxana.áak’w, a small island in Southeastern Alaska. She writes and thrives at her fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan in Wrangell. She’s a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of the first LGBTQIA+ group on the island. She’s the author of a dozen books, including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She’s also a co-founder and co-facilitator of two Alaskan writers’ groups: Blue Canoe Writers and the Drumlin Poets.
