Megan J. Arlett
Megan J. Arlett was born in the UK, grew up in Spain, and now lives in New Mexico. She is recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, the phoebe nonfiction prize, and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Best New British and Irish Poets, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her first book, The Garden Party, is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press in March 2027.
BRIEF INTERLUDE BETWEEN EXISTENTIAL OVERWHELMS
I am riding my bike and my husband is riding his.
Please leave us alone together.
The donkey on the corner of South Avenue I and Roosevelt Rd 7 pushes
both shins against the single wire penning her.
Prairie dogs run against the cool blue wind.
My shoes like blue hooves. Grasshoppers
sting against my skin, move like springs.
All day: buy buy buy says the little screen. I switch to the similar
insistences of the medium screen.
My bike is named JR after my grandfather.
A man who rode from John O’ Groats to Lands End unassisted
in 78 hours
and 16 minutes and took naps like a cat in the long grasses.
He must have purred.
It is possible to be happy even when you are
not. Dust cloud queen tired
of living through history, these days of scroll and doom.
O grandad. Now: Queen of personal
records (she once was slow now less so).
Building a personal literature
as queen of the mountain (10ft elevation gain),
queen of rural byway 70, another
hour as queen of back road gravel.
I devote time to sunflowers
in the drainage ditch, speed on the downward, breath on the hill,
quadriceps of distraction two hot embers.