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.