When the archeologists by Carol Potter

………..dug up the Giant Ape from our back yard I was not surprised. Certainly, something huge had been lurking there. Something with outsized teeth and long hair. Not your ex-husband, not mine, and not a lost dog. Something that could toss you over its back and step on you and there you’d be. I knew it was out there the whole time. It had to do with the ringing in my ears. And, of course with my bank account, and many of the bad decisions I’ve made along the way. I can hear them stirring –our original ancestors, the apes, pulling themselves hand over hand through the dirt. Would I like to see any of them right now?  Yes, I would, but not in the way you might think.  I keep pictures of them on the fridge. But still I’m not sure they’d be so glad to find me here at the table. Shivering in the cold. Pretty much hairless, and not so good in the trees.  When they show up, they’re going to want to know what I’ve been doing all this time. Why the table? Why the chair? Why that baffled look on my face?

 


Carol Potter is the 2014 winner of the Field Poetry Prize from Oberlin College Press for her fifth book of poems, Some Slow Bees. Forthcoming publications include poems in Plume, Hotel Amerika, and The Laurel Review. She lives in Vermont and teaches for the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program.

Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash

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