There is no room<\/p>\n
in my heart for moonlight<\/p>\n
over Mount Juneau<\/p>\n
or Mount Jumbo<\/p>\n
no room for the counting<\/p>\n
of stars or constellations,<\/p>\n
of the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters<\/p>\n
this open cluster a composer<\/p>\n
of middle-aged stars<\/p>\n
large incandescent celestial bodies<\/p>\n
with luminous points<\/p>\n
no room for the Big Dipper<\/p>\n
its ladle of glistening gems<\/p>\n
shackled ‘round my ankles.<\/p>\n
Grounding me to this town,<\/p>\n
to this street void of lampposts<\/p>\n
to this shuttered aorta of a house.<\/p>\n
A gray shroud repeats<\/p>\n
in cloud-form, fog-like gowns<\/p>\n
flapping in the gale<\/p>\n
of the Taku Winds whipping<\/p>\n
down South Franklin Street.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow is the uninvited guest<\/p>\n
of my best friend’s death knocking<\/p>\n
in remembrance at my shuttered windows.<\/p>\n
Grief beckons its left hand to me<\/p>\n
a flashing light on a buoy at sea<\/p>\n
I am choking on the echoing sounds<\/p>\n
of sorrow. My breath in my ears<\/p>\n
pounds the shore where that buoy<\/p>\n
bobs under again and again<\/p>\n
sparring in rhythm with the ebb<\/p>\n
and flow of the tides<\/p>\n
punched aloft by the light<\/p>\n
rising ascendant like shooting stars in this purple-black night sky.<\/p>\n
— Alexis Ross Miller<\/em><\/ins><\/p>\n • Alexis Ross Miller is born and bred Alaska. She was born in Fairbanks and moved to Juneau at 3. She has lived and worked in Ketchikan, Sitka, Petersburg, Juneau, Anchorage, Fairbanks and Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow). <\/em><\/p>\n The Capital City Weekly accepts submissions of poetry, fiction and nonfiction for Writers’ Weir. To submit a piece for consideration, email us at editor@juneauempire.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A poem by Alexis Ross Miller. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":61273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":11,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4],"tags":[73],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-61272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home2","category-news","tag-ccw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61272"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=61272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}