A Pangolin Rolls Up in a Box at Airport Customs
More than a million pangolins were caught from the wild
between 2000 and 2013, making the species
the most trafficked mammal in the world
His long tail wraps around his body
as every abdominal muscle works itself
tighter. He’s balancing on his head now,
front arms tucked into his stomach, stocky
back legs clawing the air, eager to settle.
He unfurls to adjust his head once more
then lies as if frozen with only his scales
to protect him. They aren’t designed
to keep humans at bay. He’s lucky
he was transported live and not
as a bag of scales, already reduced to
a hangover cure or a remedy for itching
and asthma. The box is empty except for
the pangolin, who occupies a small corner
of the relatively vast interior, like a ball
thrown into an empty room and left there,
forgotten. His abdomen rises and falls.
The exquisite armor of his back spreads
and contracts as agents talk and laugh
in the near distance. Just another day
for them. He may die from stress
before he reaches safety. He’s one
of hundreds of thousands each year
who meet this end or worse, never
making it to customs alive. His name
comes from the Malay word penggulung,
which means roller and describes
what he’s doing, rolling under threat
in self-defense. I want to tell you
that I’ve felt like a pangolin, that I’ve
curved my back and tucked my head
and limbs inside to protect my soft
center, that I’m not being metaphorical,
that humans get trafficked, too, even
when we don’t know the word because
we’re young and we aren’t poached
as much as harvested within our families
so even if we had scales, we wouldn’t
expose them because the man reaching
for us is our father or one of his friends.
But mostly I want you to save this pangolin
and every pangolin on Earth, and that’s not
a metaphor either, but it’s also a metaphor.
It’s both at once, like a living being who’s
also a cure for someone else’s suffering
even though they aren’t and never will be.
*
Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Laurel Review, Mad in America, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, SWWIM, Trampoline, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).