sounds like clickbait but im not lying
have u ever felt a hip unhinge?
have u ever really been inside ur own body?
how about someone elses?
its not easy u know
to be a porn monster
i know im more than just an octopus
or squid / cuttlefish / nautilus
which r all different cephs by the way
but thats not the body part u care about
can u see past my tentacles?
i know my arms r made for more than just
u know?
ive been taught many things about myself
like my grip is tight (Xie et al., 2020)
like my arms r made for complex tasks
prey capture / sucking / manipulation (Wang et al., 2025)
which dont seem so incredible when u do them
but what do i know?
im just a complex eye attached to a tentacle
im a study of never letting go (Frey et al., 2022)
im just a pink glob of wet pixels
angled out from the deep & loaded into ur browser
so u can watch me
its easy
im naked & spread open on ur lab bench
Click me
Click me
Click me
References:
Frey, S. T., Haque, A. B. M. T., Tutika, R., Krotz, E. V., Lee, C., Haverkamp, C. B., Markvicka, E. J., & Bartlett, M. D. (2022). Octopus-inspired adhesive skins for intelligent & rapidly switchable underwater adhesion. Science Advances.
Wang, Y., Liu, D., Hu, D., Wang, C., Li, Z., Wu, J., Jiang, P., Yang, X., Bai, C., Ji, Z., Jia, X., & Wang, X. (2025). Octopus-Inspired Self-Adaptive Hydrogel Gripper Capable of Manipulating Ultra-Soft Objects. Nano-Micro Letters, 18(1), 33.
Xie, Z., Domel, A. G., An, N., Green, C., Gong, Z., Wang, T., Knubben, E. M., Weaver, J. C., Bertoldi, K., & Wen, L. (2020). Octopus Arm-Inspired Tapered Soft Actuators with Suckers for Improved Grasping. Soft Robotics.
~~~Megan Horsthuis is a Canadian ecologist and MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her recent wildlife poetry is anthologized by The Dark Mountain Project. They live on stolen xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ land, where they work as an editor for PRISM International magazine. In her free time, she enjoys crouching by tide pools and disappearing into the woods.
