Megan J Arlett: How I Wrote ‘Fresh Meat’

Interview by Zoë Brigley

My poems often float around in fragmented and incomplete drafts until that first, encapsulating line arrives on the page

Fresh Meat

A rare sea creature in an evening gown,
I float around the tables and try
to find my name
made foreign by calligraphy.
My left-hand neighbour is already seated
and reading Course in General Linguistics,
which proves he has no idea
how to communicate with other humans.
On the table, candles shake as they wait
and each of us gifted a soft, white swan.
To my right, the card simply reads: Rufus.
I imagine him gentle-eyed, an innocent
kind of generous. So different from all the men
who cock about like wolf in sheep’s
cummerbund, who want compliments,
success, always a smile served with steak
when he strides through the door.
With a howl of golden hair,
Rufus’s arrival interrupts this dreaming.
He holds a pheasant in his mouth,
its neck like a limp ladies glove,
feathers a damn fiasco against his chest.
He drops the bird on his plate
and pants with pleasure. His eyes ask:
Am I the good boy?

What a great opening line in this poem! And a disturbing close to the poem too. Do you spend a lot of thought on the beginnings and endings of poems?

Frustratingly, my poems often float around in fragmented and incomplete drafts until that first, encapsulating line arrives on the page. It’s the front door to the house and sometimes it takes a few swatches to decide on the right colour paint. Sometimes (a miracle? a fluke?) it arrives fully formed, no changes needed. This first line was a bit of reverse engineering, I had already been thinking about the way evening gowns “float” and using ocean imagery like jellyfish in my work, so it made sense that this poem would include a rare sea creature. As for endings, poems and contemporary fiction have a lot in common. We want to feel the conclusion of some kind of arc, whether that’s narrative or emotional, but my favourite kinds of stories and poems are ones that feel open. Like that final, closing knell is one of possibility just as much as it is finality.

There is a dream like quality to the unexpected things that happen in this poem. What do you think are the benefits of breaking out of realism?

This poem is part of a book project titled “The Garden Party” in which a female speaker moves about the space of a surrealist, fabulist British garden party as a way to examine and mock the social and cultural customs we engage with without even thinking: the expectations and language of an RSVP, how we take canapes as if we’re not starving and counting down the minutes until dinner, our societal expectations that women are polite to the men who flirt with them even if they’re not interested. It’s all made up and ridiculous, and yet we consider it realism. As soon as you ask someone to look at it all like it’s fake, the whole thing falls apart.

I am hugely influenced by poets like Laura Kasischke who follow metaphors down rabbit holes and see where it takes the narrative of a poem. In Hostess, the poem focuses on the surreal space of a social gathering, but in its last movement Kasischke writes:

“[…]I
smoke a cigarette, which fills

my whole body with the calm that comes
just after the barn
has burned to the ground, and the farmers’ wives
in nightgowns stand
around in moonlit air, their
breasts nearly exposed, their

swan-necks warm […]”
Laura Kasischke, Hostess

Since the first time I read the poem, I’ve been obsessed with the way this metaphor suddenly pivoted and served as a window into a whole separate, imagined story of these farmers’ wives before we return to the “actual” scene the speaker is experiencing. It helped me see that poetry could be a way to take the strange and mystical and apply it as a lens over the stories we want to tell.

The ‘Fresh Meat’ of the title might be the steak or the dead pheasant, but it might also be the female speaker herself among the wolf men?

All of the above, right? Primarily, I was thinking of the role of the speaker in the poem as a piece of meat thrown into the feeding tank. In the poem she is both someone who feels they are being looked at, but she simultaneously judges the other people at the table as potential suitors. It’s the classic “singles table” at a wedding situation. In the end, her perfect man does arrive and he’s a golden retriever.