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Chimera

Recent advances in genetic analysis have revealed
that chimerism is common. – Tim Flannery,
New York Review of Books, March 7, 2019

Phantom twin who never was
X and Y alike in DNA
blood type both A and O
chimera – two eggs merged
and married in the womb

The Greeks imagined you
lion / goat / snake mingled
a mythical amalgamation

I sense you hovering
a distant, doubled being
an almost self, unseen
and out of reach

You murmur from afar
me / not me, same yet not
complex consciousness –
after all, which one of us
is a single thing alone

Sally Zakariya is a former magazine writer/editor who lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and two cats. She writes poetry at an antique desk looking out at telephone wires and maple trees.