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Palimpsest

This poem was originally published in 2025 in La Picioletta Barca.

Hank Green teaches me a fun fact about a caterpillar called the Mad Hatterpillar

 

which is a caterpillar that wears up to six hats fashioned out of its own

 

molted heads, which could be sickening if it weren’t so sick, right?

 

I'm thinking about it now, my Roman Empire, somewhere in the vast ecosystem

 

of Tumblr, reblogged #gemini vibes and #how’d nat geo find this

 

photo of me and screenshotted to someone’s Finsta story, captioned drip or next

 

Met Gala theme just dropped or babe would you still love me

 

if I was the mad hatterpillar? I’m telling you, this postmodern caterpillar has butterflied

 

the very fabric of my being like a beef filet in a cast iron, this obviously

 

Australian caterpillar who is not your grandmother’s caterpillar, not Eric Carle’s

 

caterpillar, this snatched insect giving biblically accurate cherubim, giving overworked

 

intern at a Silicon Valley startup, giving took one poetry workshop on palimpsest

 

and fashioned its entire personality and an Etsy line of bespoke sustainable crochet

 

beanies around it, giving maybe this caterpillar might have something to do

 

with my childhood. Little crawling thing, braving metamorphosis.

© Riley O'Connell 2025

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