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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.

Magnus McDowall

We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.

We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights

Sarah Boyd

He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and

Samantha Carr

You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps

Helen Akers

we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it   

Jenny Robb

By the light of a wolf moon,
my father turns mad.
Anne whispers to a girl in the wind,
and a friend blows into my life.