We are not so exclusively human, but a combination of other pre-human DNA. We therefore retain the biological connection to all strains of who and what has lived before, wondering inward toward the trunk of the tree of evolution.

We are many

We are puppeteers, peddlers, Ivan the Staker

goddesses or Asimov, grunts, healers and diseased

Lingering in our marrow, DNA ghosts. Our lashes

we barely see when squinting are our thickset cousins’

Roaming angelic with the fowl, proper and Neanderthal

the Far East, Norubians fornicating on rafts of reeds

Moving inward toward the fleshy trunk of evolution’s

stocky tree, we can sniff, sniff what we have been

Retaining the fur, the bio insides, connections to

Canine howls, puffin snortles, drools of megafauna

Species is our construct, a wall of attraction, hiding

swathes of fenceless genomes under berry bushes

Painting new cliffs from which to jump, we alone

an illusory perception, making sense of who we aren’t

Laying upon each other through strata of bodies

at ancestral orgies—oh, the fun we’ve had

As sun melts frost and memory from our proud core
Along a ridge of the free sky run synapse and sperm