MEAGAN ARTHUR

Fibers

after Donna Haraway

When I say everything

what I mean is that oysters are squishy gray gods.

I think the veins had it right

(in the matter of trying, at least);

sometimes everyone falls over on the same day but we are

still-sending warm.

When it’s spring we watch television shows about new beginnings.

The egg children understand when they’re destroyed:

what I mean is we are skin changers,

trusting colorful pieces of ourselves across beaches,

always knowing earthlings are

an enfolding and there is no mixing

to the already tossed sandglass.

We are consistently entangled with.

What I mean is that fear is a tentacle plant:

not to be confused with The Absence Of,

but wrapping around itself in cycles

never-made of the same feeling cells at once

(all things and all things are).

What I mean is there’s no need to scratch cheeks;

what I mean is look at us.

Meagan Arthur is a fiction writer and poet from the Seattle area. She graduated with an MFA in Prose from the University of Washington in 2018, where her work was awarded the Grace Milliman Pollock Award. Her fiction has appeared in Déraciné Magazine and will be featured in a forthcoming anthology from Malarkey Books; her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, the California Quarterly, Hummingbird, and elsewhere. She currently teaches writing at Seattle Pacific University.