ARACHNOPHILIA
By Katie Farris
Something soft in its shell. This is its evolution. Consign it all outward, an excretion.
What can’t be consigned is too close.
The craneflies keep getting into the house and dying elaborate, long-legged deaths;
they scramble their legs all over the tiles, shoving their proboscises into the grout.
Their deaths feel like deaths,
unlike daddylonglegs, whose deaths tumbleweed them into corners, vegetative.
Craneflies and daddylonglegs both (all craneflies are daddylonglegs, but not all daddylonglegs are
craneflies) have exoskeletons, which keep everything consigned outward.
If only I could write about people. If only people existed. If only I were people.
Without a chitinous exoskeleton, people feel with their entire skins
An IMAX of an organ
the eyes of arachnids are enormous, multifaceted, and complex.
All creatures should charge an entry fee to the carnival of their bodies.
Katie Farris’s poetry, fictions, and translations have appeared in various journals, including Virginia Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review, Verse, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Gulf Coast, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Her work has been translated into Lithuanian, and most recently into Spanish by Pura López-Colomé. In 2017, she won the Orison Anthology Award in Fiction.
She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University, and is currently an Associate Professor in the MFA program at San Diego State University, where she won an Innovation in Teaching Award in 2013.
Find out more about Katie at her website katiefarris.net and see her latest beautiful project, a chapbook of flash fiction titled Thirteen Intimacies at Fivehundred Places.