Butterfly Roots, by Frederick Livingston

Poetry, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

These poems grew from conservation programs brought into prisons across the American West. We propagated native seedlings to revegetate damaged lands. We reared larvae of endangered butterflies to reestablish wild populations.

Moving through barbed coils, long corridors, and heavy doors, I struggled to imagine the day weeds claim the crumbling walls. I did not want sustainability programs to sustain prisons, to merely paint concrete green.

But expanding our refugia, as forests do after fire, could we stitch the edges of our efforts together until correctional facilities become unrecognizable? Until the idea of containing harm within fences goes from unquestioned to absurd?

Frederick Livingston is a spoken word ecologist from the Salish Sea and Cascade Mountains. His path of words, education, and plants has taken him from mudbrick classrooms to prisons, wilderness, and beyond. His previous collections include “Trees are Bridges to the Sky” and “The Moon and Other Fruits.”