Today’s choice
Previous poems
Kathleen Bryson
I Am the Dreaming Herpetogaster Chimera : Painting by Kathleen Bryson
I Am the Dreaming Herpetogaster Chimera
I am the dreaming herpetogaster chimera and
I am part-and-parcel of the impossible animals project.
My cherry-blossoming phallic self
obviously dubbed after some ropy denizen
of the British diaspora as Herpetogaster collinsi
who didn’t want to mention the word penis
but not Phil Collins or your average cocktail.
Don’t mention the naked molerats.
I had my ambitions 509 million years ago
and by 497 million years ago they had been extinguished.
I pick through Burgess shale with raw fingers.
I don’t. I don’t have fingers. I don’t.
There is no prehistoric mysticism to any shifts
I may have provoked though it is possible that
the sway of my marine biology
in some small chaos theory manner
influenced the now-ness of you the reader
just as much as the twist flaps of those dirty gals the Lepidoptera
Kathleen Bryson is an Alaskan-born evolutionary anthropologist, with a day job as an EU VR/AI research fellow and with previous posts at Oxford and QMUL. She has had four novels previously published and 45+ poems in publications ranging from Magma to Ghost City Review. Her website is www.kathleenbryson.com.
Gita Ralleigh, Julian Matthews, Jackie Taylor on Colouring Outside the Lines
The hue of brides, appliquéd dark with henna.
Citron’s acid curl, vernal blades between teeth.
Sue Moules
I sell the postcard
of multi-coloured sheep
over and over again.
Kevin Denwood
Name called.
Not mine.
Wasn’t I
here first?
L Kiew
I leave everything on shingle,
meet surf like a sibling,
crest over playful breakers
and chase the moon’s tail.
Margaret Baldock
We launched, lovingly
into dark and silky water
unknown yet benign.
Krishh Biswal
You did not ask for knees —
They found the floor themselves.
Not from command,
But gravity.
Tamara Salih
That winter the snow kept rising,
a slow white wall climbing the windows,
each morning untouched,
Alicia Byrne Keane
I’ve been reading about ghost apples.
They are a real phenomenon, like how
everyone we can see on the wide street
outside this building is still living,
Gareth Culshaw
I tried to work from a van. Sitting in the passenger
seat listening to a guy whistle. His frown, a cloud
he lost when his mother died. Each wrinkle