Pre-Anthropocene, Michaela Mayer

to be an insect trapped inside its doom

ambered forever sticky & translucent

or a mammoth in tar black as molasses

sugars the pit of my thoughts

i am a night of the cretaceous

dark & filled with fluttering things

whose wings flit & buzz amongst

the closed throats of huge flowers

no people here, only ponderous beasts

with names like velociraptor, pterosaur,

ichthyornis; i stretch feathered wings

untouched by your smooth cloying skin

i roar; watch me rise dark and terrible

over the soft meat of a corpse, scaled

& feathered, spotted with blood—

see my great head raised, not an inkling

of your future ancestors’ meteoric rise.

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Michaela Mayer is a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher and poet from Virginia. Her works have been previously published in Burning House Press, Mineral Lit Mag, Minute Magazine, Snapdragon Journal, Winged Nation, Perhappened, and Windows Facing Windows. She can be found on Twitter @mswannmayer5.