Meredith Arena

Crow Time

I’m going to walk around my house
again for not the last time
now wanting a solution
for some other vacancy. 

Repetition tempts me into solitude,
climb the stairs ignoring the same images:
Dust bunnies gathering on the plains
of dented wood, fields of rye. 

Always soft swooshing from
here to there, a snail’s breath
whips them up; 

a murder arrives outside
takes up residency on power
lines. War begins again.

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Meredith Arena (she/they) is a queer writer originally from New York City. She moved to Seattle in 2011 and learned how to drive in 2015. She is an interdisciplinary teaching artist, facilitator and organizer. She served as an editor on the journal Lunch Ticket for two years. Her work can be found in various journals including Longleaf Review, Entropy, Lunch Ticket, Peatsmoke, Blood Orange Review and forthcoming in Poetry Northwest. She was the 2021 Erin Donovan fellow in poetry at Mineral School in Washington. She holds an MFA in creative writing and a Certificate in the Teaching of Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.