STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
BRITTNEY CORRIGAN
I claimed the spine-sailed monster as my own, balled
my tiny fists around its plastic forms—primary reds
or blues then—not these life-like replicas, incongruous
beside the blind-boxed anime figurines that
line my children’s shelves. Dimetrodon, named for two
measures of teeth in its slope-curved jaw, neural
vertebrae anchored in its muscular back. Each
ascending bone suggests the crosshatch of a fish. Years
later I would learn it’s not a dinosaur at all. Cisuralian
beast, extinct some 40 million years before orders
of reptiles evolved to rule the Earth. Less reptile
than mammal—synapsid—not mammal, not reptile.
What manner of creature might I be, then, if
my children think me one thing—Garanimal
mother of bright, simple hues—but another
woman rises up, window-skulled, manifold and new?
Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Navigation and 40 Weeks. A chapbook responding to events in the news, Breaking, will be published by WordTech Editions in April 2021. Daughters, a series of persona poems in the voices of daughters of various characters from folklore, mythology, and popular culture, is forthcoming from Airlie Press in 2021. 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/.
