Brittney Corrigan

Roadkill Afterlife

“Just because it’s the end of an animal’s life doesn’t mean it’s the end of its story.”
—National Geographic

i: Caloric

Sometimes rodents and deer chew
on the bones. Insects and fungi surge
on comestible flesh. Coyotes and bears
redden their snouts in the night.
Sometimes the eagles. Sometimes
the crows. Sometimes the carcass-deep
vultures feasting at the pavement’s edge.

ii: Aesthetic 

One artist still lifes the bristle-tailed body
so it appears only sleeping, curled into
a porcelain dish among bright-seeded figs.
One artist filigrees a curve-horned skull:
lotus-carved forehead, toothed jawbone
calligraphed with light. One artist casts
claws, shapes talons to dangle from necks. 

iii: Scientific 

Small body collected by careful, gloved hands.
How the skin of the torso parts to reveal
the non-pulse, non-breath of gorgeous organs
carrying secrets, codes, last meals. Bones
offer up their stories to mind after mind
after mind. Salvaged being, specimen-body
under knife, under scope, under eye.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation and 40 Weeks. Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction and the Anthropocene Age, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2023. Brittney was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for the past three decades, where she is an alumna and employee of Reed College. She is currently at work on her first short story collection. For more information, visit http://brittneycorrigan.com/.