Hannah Rodabaugh


Martha at the Smithsonian


”She’s one of the Smithsonian's most iconic specimens,” Helen James, curator of the bird division, says. "We had to have her back before her public in the year 2014.”  
–from “Martha, the Very Last Passenger Pigeon,” The Atlantic


On the 100-year anniversary of her death (imagine
the end of the who and the what of you), her rusty

brown specimen put out in a glass case for a new
memorial exhibit. A celebration, we said, this form

of going backwards. Holding up a body to believe
in as hallelujah, as what can save us, the earth

we all remember, the earth those we remember
still remember, the lumberjacks who posed with

twisted tree stumps (look ma, four men deep!) to
show how big they really were, to show how we

were overshadowed, the wonderment and cruelty
of it, to be believed and to believe. We’re still here,

though. We still have these thoughts, this conscious
loss. What does Martha have? What did her public

finally give her? A memorial eyes can’t see?
A reckoning of faith, still too late to save her?

 

Hannah Rodabaugh holds an MA from Miami University and an MFA from Naropa University. She is the author of three chapbooks, including We Don't Bury Our Dead When Our Dead Are Animals, a collection of ecological elegies, and With Words: Verse in Concordance, a prose poem dictionary. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Indianapolis Review, Camas Magazine, Glassworks Magazine, Blueline Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, Evening Street Review, K’in Literary Journal, Horse Less Review, and many others. She has received grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and the Treasure Valley COVID Cultural Commissioning Fund, and has been an Artist-in-Residence for the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and Surel’s Place. She is an English instructor at Boise State University and a teaching writer at The Cabin, Idaho’s only literary center.

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