National Geographic/Katherine Hannaford

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Palimpsest

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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.

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