Split Tooth

As summer ends and night returns, the narrator feels that her babies want to see their father, the Northern Lights. She knows they are not normal babies because they can shapeshift in her womb, growing legs and tails and fusing together into one being before separating. She goes to see the Northern Lights, but the babies start dancing and moving in time with the lights, and she realizes if she stays, they will want to be born. At home, the narrator’s breasts ooze a green liquid. She begins to prepare for the birth, which will happen away from other people with only Helen present. She knows that she must give birth on “five caribou skins, forty-two smooth stones, eleven ptarmigan stomachs, eight human teeth, and a flask of eighteen-year-old whisky” (149). Her babies tell her their birth date two days in advance. She hopes that the Northern Lights will not take her babies from her. 

A free verse poem describes the speaker’s joy and love at the birth of a daughter. An illustration of an igloo under the Northern Lights accompanies it.

The night of birth arrives. The narrator and Helen meet at an igloo Helen built on the ice.