Issue 49.3
Megan Hall

Ars Poetica in Hiding

the star nosed mole touches her world with one fibrous galactic eye burrowing high resolution blowing bubbles into water logged tunnels like some fuzzy Martian or a girl fleeing her father she spends nearly her entire life under ground but on blustery days like this one when there’s no more light to lick from the walls I’ve flung myself open with every door in the house to let it all in to somehow flush out what’s been over processed refusing to let it eat me playing dead at my desk ink pen slithering like the olive green dice snake who flips herself over emits a foul odor fear locking my limbs I drop a silk dragline become the cellar spider at the shower’s corner motionless as an orchid mantis appearing to war mongers a delicate flower harmless in shifting degrees of red and pink ocean pumping over my gills I think octopus thoughts suctioned against a bamboo coral hidden for the hunt since poetry holds not a linear knowing but the shadow growing and retracting inside of my speech spun shell
Megan Hall is a poet and third-year Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at Georgia State University. Rooted in the landscapes and histories of the South, her work engages themes of ecofeminism, bodily autonomy, and the intersections of poverty, gender, and power. She is currently completing a book-length collection that examines the systemic inequalities shaping and endangering the lives of women and girls. Her poems have appeared in Yalobusha Review, Wild Roof Journal, Soliloquies Anthology, Inkwell Journal, and Slipstream Magazine, among others.