A Sunday series from RVA Magazine featuring writers from Richmond and Virginia
Writer’s Block is RVA Magazine’s Sunday series highlighting contemporary writers working in Richmond and across the Commonwealth. Each week, we feature original poems, short stories, or essays. Just real voices writing right now.
This week, we’re featuring three poems from the unpublished ARTHROPOETRY by Noah Strickler, a Richmond-born writer, musician, and filmmaker whose work finds the grotesque and the beautiful living side by side. Written during a stint in an outpatient mental health program, ARTHROPOETRY draws inspiration from arthropods aka insects, arachnids, and other crawling things to explore human fragility, survival, and perception. Whether he’s writing about codependency through the metaphor of flypaper or honoring the strange wisdom of a spider who grows new eyes each night, Strickler’s voice is lyrical, layered, and full of unexpected empathy. This is his first time publishing poetry.
You can reach him at stricklerng@gmail.com
If you’d like to be featured, send your work to hello@rvamag.com with the subject line “Writer’s Block.”
Ogre-Faced Spider
by Noah Strickler
She sits high in the trunk,
drinking in the radiant spectrum of moonlight.
Embracing the tangled net,
tenuous and painstakingly borne—
from her body,
trap & tapestry draped between her narrow limbs.
No acrobat or weaver may ever match her.
No hunter or oracle shall equal the way she watches.
Enough to make an arachnid feel immortal.
Even against the abyss of the stars.
and yet—
Each morning,
an incomprehensible fire erupts from the heavens
and in an instant—
the seer’s eyes ignite and she is enveloped in the darkness of the day.
Left awaiting the inevitable inkiness,
where in those first few moments of soothing night,
new globes bloom from blackened sockets,
and the cycle of the fragile sage starts anew.
Vacancy at the Roach Motel
by Noah Strickler
When I was a roach,
I lived on the ground—
in the muck and dirt of the murky earth.
I remember stretching my ruddy thorax,
straining to reach the sun or shadows.
I could go where I wished.
I lived as I pleased.
Now, I am a man,
and I build my house around the old homes of roaches,
and I cast curses and death on them,
like a cruel and distant god.
“What gives you the right,”
I ask the roaches,
“To befoul and corrupt this,
my home, that I fought and bled and killed for?”
And the roaches reply,
“This is not your home,
this is a motel,
not for us,
for you,
and when the time comes,
you will return to the earth,
the muck and the dirt,
you will join us as equals,
or as bones,
picked clean by our brothers and sisters.”
I sigh and stomp down my boot.
If only I’d ever been a roach,
maybe I could understand.
Flypaper Origami
by Noah Strickler
Fold, crease, fold, crease, fold
Seven times is the limit
But I am not paper
I am flesh that yields
I surrender
Like a fly—
Caught between a pair of forceps.
Crushed by forces I could never hope to control or understand.
The past and future are a vise,
constricting the crucible of my present.
Someday, you will tire of this shape,
but even if you wish to release me,
flypaper sticks to itself.
Flypaper smothers everything.
And you will find the form you molded me into
will endure, until you too are drawn in
sinking into the creased paper
Like a fly—
Photo by Vidar Nordli Mathisen
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