IGUANA
Gretchen Fletcher

I watch him,
a latter-day leviathan,
as he rises from the depths
to break the black surface
with his fern green head,
all finny points and scaly crags,
housing that most primitive brain
named for his class: Reptilia.

Dragging his straggly dewlap
like the beard of an ancient,
he snakes silently through the canal,
foraging for vegetation,
propelled by the underwater
lashing of his serpentine tail
all ringed in black and green.

Out of synch with chronology,
he comes from a past
my ancestors don't yet inhabit
as if surfacing from my deepest
nightmares, a cold-blooded incubus.