by Chrys Tobey
Featured Art: The Visit – Couple and Newcomer by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
I hunted deer for you. I scratched your back with stone tools
and we swaddled each other in fur from sabre-tooth cats
and laughed as we said, burp me. We’d say things like, You know what
they say about a large cranium. I’d chase a woolly mammoth
just because you thought it was sexy. We’d snort chamomile
and talk about how after we’re dead others will ponder our
big toes and our inability to ice-skate. When we were Neanderthals,
you’d make me necklaces of shell, and because this was a few years
before the Pill, we had a kid, but because this was also a few years
before the Catholic Church, we eventually mastered when to pull out.
When we were Neanderthals, we had no buses to take, no offices
to be at, no flights from Germany to wherever. I was never
lonely. You’d run and hide in the woods and I’d try to spot you. We
thought the stars were ours. We thought the earth was square.
We thought the sky was a song, and then the Homo sapiens came.