notdeermag
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.
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.