Brittney Corrigan

Of Walls and Wings

By Brittney Corrigan

I wrote the poem “Sanctuary” as the debate over funding for Trump’s border wall heated up in February, 2019. With the looming possibility of another government shutdown and the president's hubristic declaration of a national emergency, I was drawn to the story of the wall construction that threatened the National Butterfly Center, a private 100-acre nature and wildlife sanctuary in Mission, Texas, which is home to 240 species of butterflies. It is situated across the threshold of the border in the Rio Grande Valley, part of a six-mile stretch of land in the wall’s path, along with several other sacred sites, endangered wildlife habitats, and longtime residents. Many local communities were fighting to protect this stretch of land from the intrusion of the wall, including a local congressman who managed to block construction with a last minute budget provision. Unfortunately, it didn’t hold.

After a district judge rejected suits against it from the federal government as well as the National Butterfly Center, the three-and-a-half mile Rio Grande Valley wall was constructed. In addition, citizens who support the border wall have founded an organization to continue the project with private donations. Marianna Treviño-Wright, the director of the butterfly refuge, has been outspoken in opposition to the wall and its effect on the local area, which she describes as being turned into a “war zone”. 

I felt drawn to write about what the construction of the wall says not only about our current government’s lack of regard for the land, the people, and the endangered wildlife it puts in jeopardy but also what it means logistically and symbolically to those who wish to immigrate to the United States. I wanted to use the metamorphosis of a butterfly as a metaphor for the current situation at the U.S./Mexico border.

When a caterpillar reaches the chrysalis stage of its transformation, what happens inside that shell is nothing short of remarkable. The caterpillar does not simply sprout wings and become a butterfly. Its entire body liquifies, releasing enzymes to digest itself and dissolve all of its tissues. Highly organized groups of cells called imaginal discs survive the process and go through rapid cell division, using the remaining protein-rich soup as fuel, to become the new butterfly that eventually emerges.

Thinking about the many endangered butterflies at the Texas sanctuary, I imagined their vulnerability as their bodies changed from one form to another in the shadow of the construction of the wall. As I wrote, I also held in my consciousness the fate of the many refugees at the border, attempting their own transformation of their lives in the face of so many barriers and such hatred. This poem is meant as a plea for the safety of all those lives struggling at the US/Mexico border.

Janine Certo

Janine Certo on “How to Haunt Humans”

I’ve always loved poems about animals, but that piqued in 2003 after I read what remains my favorite poetry collection to this day. Robert Wrigley’s Lives of the Animals. The speaker’s inquiry into the animal world is marked by a respect and a nuanced observation where in many of the poems, the tables are turned. Animal now regards human. 

I wrote “How to Haunt Humans” in the summer of 2019. I’d just finished Matthieu Ricard’s well-researched book, A Plea for the Animals: The Moral, Philosophical, and Evolutionary Imperative to Treat All Beings with Compassion. The text rails against the anthropocentrism of the Judeo-Christian tradition and argues what I’ve known since childhood. If one lacks compassion toward animals, one lacks compassion toward human beings as well. At the same time, like many SRR readers, I was digesting the myriad articles about how our planet is losing new species daily. I wanted to join the chorus of writers who have written about how we have harmed-exploited-neglected-underestimated animals, and what the implications might be. 

As I wrote, I quickly realized the poem worked better as a hybrid piece. It was liberating to imagine some hyper-intelligent animal narrating a reference guide for other animals. As one might imagine, earlier drafts were lengthier with guide entries from A-Z. I’m sure readers will be able to think of their own entries.  

Of course, “How to Haunt Humans” was written before COVID-19. Before this collective crisis we are all experiencing. A wise friend recently emailed me: “The Yunnan Box Turtle reference in the poem is specifically haunting right now as we humans experience the animal virus and see Spring and her indifferent animal life taking its same pleasures now during our isolation.” 

Best New Poets 2020 Nominations

We’re thrilled to announce our nominations for Best New Poets 2020!

Congratulations to Erin Redfern for her poem “Gulls in the Valley” and Jennifer Brown for her poem “The Loneliness of Things in Broad Daylight”! Thanks so much for letting us publish your lovely poems. Best of luck to you and all the poets!

Catharina Coenen

CATHARINA COENEN ON “CONNEAUT”

Twenty years ago, during my first March in the snowbelt, I asked my students whether it was going to keep snowing all the way up to Spring Break. They stared, then said: You don’t understand. They said: We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t keep on snowing too much after Spring Break. 

I am a botanist. Where I grew up, March lives well past the snowdrops, past the crocus, way past the ivy’s tiny yellow blossoms feeding bees along thousand-year old sandstone walls. Where I grew up, March hails the primrose, the coltsfoot aglow beside the roadside ditch, the scent of violets. Forsythias beam yellow sunshine through any rain or gray.

Like Pennsylvania’s hemlock groves, who feel heat rushing towards them as the climate shifts, I feel displaced. Except I’ve shifted into cold. 

Last year, I signed up for a poetry webinar because, where I live now, March means snow. 

I signed up because March is snowy and months and months away from my summer conference with the International Women’s Writing Guild. In March, I miss a world that isn’t icy white. I miss my conference teachers and my friends. I miss shared words.

Last March, for four dark Sunday evenings, women writers beamed at each other from a screen. We scribbled, laughed, and frowned. 

Together, we read: All night I woke to rain on a strangers’ windows. [i]

Together, we read:      Home is the place we head for in our sleep. [ii]

We read:                      We walked five blocks

to the elementary school,

my mother’s high heels

crunching through playground gravel. [iii]

We read:                      I’m not from around here

I’m not from around here. [iv]

Through March, I walked along the marsh, beneath leafless maples, and through hemlock groves. I walked by last year’s cattail stalks, red osier twigs aglow against the gray, frozen ditches, frozen ponds. I walked, asleep, awake, words snoozing under snow, words crunching gravel, words wriggling under last year’s leaves. 

I knelt to watch skunk cabbage blossoms melt their way upward, through the ice. Back in class, I lectured on the uncoupling of electron transport by an enzyme in the maroon flowers’ cells, how mitochondria give up energy as heat, so that the skunk cabbage can advertise its corpse-like blooms to flies well before any other flowers are awake.

Where I come from, the sweet March violets are transplants from Iran. Forsythias are from China.

I wondered what it takes to be from here. 

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[i] From: When I Was Straight by Julie Marie Wade

[ii] From: Indian Boarding School: The Runaways by Louise Erdrich

[iii] From: My Mother Goes to Vote by Judith Harris

[iv] From: Hotel Days by Michael Dickman