BRITTNEY CORRIGAN
- Jun 9
- 3 min read
Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, and Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age. Brittney is the recipient of a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellowship and a former editor with Airlie Press. She was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for over three decades, where she is an event planner at her alma mater, Reed College. Brittney’s recent debut short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, won the 2023 Osprey Award for Fiction from Middle Creek Publishing.
DUPLEX WITH FIBONACCI SEQUENCE
Unraveling, I yearn for the beauty
of a pattern, for the neat spiral
of a pattern, a spiraling feat
of 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and on.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8: golden
ratio. Nautilus, pinecone, hurricane.
Ratio of not us / my own. Hurricane
where once there were sunflowers, golden
band where once there was sun. Flowers golden
in spirals of seeds. I chart my curves, my growth.
In a spiral of need, I chart curves. My growth
within this whorl of shell my heart makes.
Within this world, the shell of my heart makes
a beauty I yearn for, unraveling.
DUPLEX WITH TURKEY CARCASS
Two bowls between us on the table:
one for the meat and one for the stripped bones.
Our hands strip the bones of their meat. One
year into knowing each other. We’ve spent
this year knowing each other’s bodies, spent
hours learning muscle, learning flesh and skin.
Our yearning, leaning into muscle, flesh, skin.
You twist a wing until it gives itself
to you. The wing in your hand, I twist myself
to meet your eyes, watch as your fingers undo
the meat. Your fingers, your eyes undo me
as I move to free the wishbone from the breast.
A wish moves from inside my breastbone,
unfurls between us at the table.
DUPLEX WITH VENUS FLY TRAP
Consider how we think about suffering:
What we turn away from, or when we can’t look
away, can’t turn our gaze from what looks
like what could happen to us, any moment.
What could happen to us at any moment
is the story we tell our bodies,
the story we tell so our bodies will know
when to run, when to struggle, when to give up.
When time runs out, when we struggle but give up,
let us be taken gently, let darkness fold
around us. Let darkness take us, gently fold
us between nectar and teeth. Let others hold
us between nectar and teeth, hold us and
consider the brink: how we are suffering.
DUPLEX WITH PARALLEL LIVES
The one with the landscape of icebergs.
Surfacing backs of whales hint at what’s below.
Hinting at what’s below, whales surface. Back
when I didn’t fear math, what it could do.
What I could do when I didn’t fear math
or leaving something sure for something less so.
Leaving something sure for something less so
might have brought the one with the city of words.
The city of words might have brought the one
with the other coast. But what of my children?
What of my children on this other coast
where I dream of mountains and oceans?
I dream of mountains and oceans, where
the landscape of icebergs has no one.
DUPLEX WITH QUENCHED GALAXY
You’re every bit as beautiful as the time
when you did make stars. You took the cold
and shook stars from it. When you remade the cold
into light, the black hole felt less massive.
Now, the black hole more massive, less light,
you rest in a deep field, quiescent.
Deep in quiescence, you can rest now. Feel
the shutting down, bright burn as you dim.
As you’re shutting off lights, you turn down, spin
toward collapse. And still we can see you glow
toward us. In lapse and stillness, we see you glow,
old stars no longer haloed by new ones.
No longer haloed, old stars known once by
you over time. Every bit as beautiful.