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.
Andrew Keyman
a day later you’re in l.a. picking out cars with the magic
only money can buy
Chrissy Banks
So many times I walked
head down half asleep
along that ordinary road to school
Christopher M James
She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love
unearths them
Opeyemi Oluwayomi
They are piercing knife between
the city, detaching the body from the head,
& squeezing the blood out of the flesh,
so there can be an end to what hasn’t begun.
Rhian Thomas
I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks like a worn out song
Erwin Arroyo Pérez
Here, in my Manhattan room / insomnia tugs at me like a half-closed taxi door / letting all the echoes in
/ an ambulance carries the last breath of an asthmatic man
Hannah Linden
Formed into darkness
an octopus squeezes around
the spaces of a shipwreck.
Kweku Abimbola
My father walks backwards
better than most walk forward—
so whenever he sewed his steps into the living
room carpet, I rushed to mirror my moon-
walking, until he froze,
froze like he’d been caught
by the beat.
Paul Bavister
We found our eyes first,
as they swirled through fragments
of black jumper, dark pine trees
and an orange sunset sky