Host

In eastern Congo years ago on a road logged into a hill
I drove or was driven one evening to see pygmies
who claimed they were being eaten. This was possible.
I’d met a woman with my name who’d watched the fire
on which her arm was cooked and then devoured.
The pygmies turned out to be lying and this isn’t about pygmies.
In the truck I argued with the driver about gays and the Bible
as we lurched through the intestinal dark
toward the safe haven of a Catholic priest
who fed us the baby chimpanzee we’d seen
fighting his tether on the father’s porch.