Monica Mankin on “Hurricane’s Wake” and “Moon in Which Nothing Happens”

A few factors have turned my poetic practice toward deepening my relationship with the non-human and to scrutinizing human responses to and treatment of our environment(s).

First, living in Louisiana, I have, since Hurricane Katrina, experienced the catastrophic hurricane damage that residents of the Gulf Coast have had to face more frequently in recent years. This, coupled with the heightened sense of disaster and states of fear created by the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, has encouraged me to explore the precariousness of being alive.

Second, reading Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene a while back, the following words stayed with me:

To think-with is to stay with the natural cultural multispecies trouble on earth. There are no guarantees, no arrow of time, no Law of History or Science or Nature in such struggles. There is only the relentlessly contingent SF[1] worlding of living and dying, of becoming-with and unbecoming-with, of sympoeisis, and so, just possibly of multispecies flourishing on earth.

To contextualize and translate, humans need to stop thinking we are exceptional, with our hero story—or “the prick tale of Humans in History” as Haraway puts it—which validates our murderous and exploitative cultures. We need to get with the other species on this planet to resolve the troubles we’ve created throughout the Anthropocene. Haraway insists that we must change this story of life. So, one might ask how much can poems really do here? My practice is driven by my belief that poems can do a lot, even if they seemingly do nothing. They enter our minds through ears or eyes, and without our immediate awareness of what’s happening they work on our thinking, and this has the powerful potential to “change the story,” as Haraway urgently calls for us to do. So, these two poems are part of a larger collection in which I am working to answer that call.

Third, Lucy, my dog, and I have been together since she was born four years ago. I haven’t lived with any animals since I was a child, and then I was not in charge of keeping them alive. Her presence creates in me a different sense of my own presence in the world. Simply put, I may react one way to a situation and she reacts another, and this sometimes generates a poem’s situation or structure, as it did for both “Hurricane’s Wake” and “Moon in Which Nothing Happens.”

A while after Hurricane Ida, our block was full of construction workers and the disruptive sounds of rebuilding. There is an undefined period of uncertainty and unrest after a hurricane blows through, when debris clogs the arteries of the city-machine, and the bang and buzz and clang of rebuilding echoes through the streets, and every-one-thing is menacing. It’s tempting to leave such a place, whether temporarily or permanently, but there’s really nowhere else to go, and somehow I found a strange peace in the quiet, cyclical, non-human “dismantling” of the monarch butterfly that was devoured by ants on my front porch. In this peace, even against Lucy’s restlessness, I felt a strong need to stay put, to protect.

“Moon in Which Nothing Happens” addresses the case of the mysterious peanut shells that appeared in our backyard during the pandemic lockdown. I imagined “a trespasser skulking [the] open yard,” But Lucy was just like, All right! Peanuts! Such contrast got me thinking about the human preoccupation with trespasser violation, as evidenced by the many motion-sensitive floodlights that both my immediate neighbors installed. This is not to say animals do not defend territories or fret over becoming prey, but humans, and I think particularly Americans, are preoccupied with this in an unbalanced way, for reasons beyond mere survival instinct. We have become scared of ourselves as we have become scared of the dark, and we think if we light up the night we will be safe. Of course, this just isn’t true. “Moon in Which Nothing Happens” weaves all of these thoughts together in the hope that perhaps we can set aside fear to rediscover the abundance of all that still lives in the dark.

[1] Haraway explains in her introduction that SF is “an ubiquitous figure” throughout her book that represents: “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.”