A Few Lines on My Days Among the Humans

Hoag Holmgren

They do not give up. They skin and share blood and gut each other with tusks. They sing and scratch blood into each other’s arms. One of them with improved fingers followed me. His head aflame whenever he spoke. I had to crack open bird skulls to understand him. The welcome I was given surpassed anything. Landfills of fresh shrimp, harbors drained and filled with cognac. Live whales beached symmetrically, mouths stuffed with emeralds. 
The hosts sang the Song of Me but humbled the air with allusions to beauty-free vistas. Their creation myths, however, were beauty-rich. Beauty this, beauty that. Beauty saw herself and became the universe. Coliseums loomed where the worms of sixty winters raged. I was given gifts of blood-slick leather. I was hoisted on the shoulders of infantrymen who marched with furious armor-clad erections, who sang a great booming version of the old show tune The Ultimate Cunt. At a bend in a busy horse track they buried me up to my neck until I memorized all important history. Just when I thought they were tree-dwelling they dragged me out on the veldt. Just when I thought their hollow cheeks and veined eyes spoke volumes their fists began to chirp. At some point, someone handed me a stack of papyrus. In it I found the addresses of all my ancestors. Immediately I rung them up and threw a party. Pink socks, walking staffs, vines trailing each of us like tails. We had the best time. We got drunk and drunker and the drunker we got the more we wished the humans would go. Soon though we got too drunk. Soon we loved them.