[question asked by Christina Hall]
What the drugs do,
what fear of a break-up
leads us to & back—
no matter suits we wear,
what textbook recitations tell us,
we are wild, not far from ape-ness,
fish nature, single-celled self-
desire to halve & run from that.
Higher mind makes us more
aware of baser pulls,
not just the act but want:
perfumed scents of ambition
replacing urine on a tree.
What stops us is sadness
of the other. Call it guilt,
evolution’s flaw
mocking from classrooms
where withered professors
explain the word ‘alone.’
Header photograph © Jason D. Ramsey.
Ace Boggess is author of three books of poetry, most recently, Ultra Deep Field (Brick Road, 2017), and a novel. His fourth poetry collection, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. His writing appears in River Styx, North Dakota Quarterly, cream city review, Notre Dame Review, and many other journals. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
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