During the last ice age, everything seemed
possible. It was a fine time, flexible for
me, far from home, shivering enough at first
for two. Then you. How the water
lapped our bodies numb, lost
our feet, our hands. To touch
was to guess at feeling, faintly sensing
some bumping between us. By the end
of the last ice age, we no longer felt
our bodies anymore, and our teeth chattered so
loudly we couldn’t hear each other over
the ice cracking hard in the cold world
around us. With brain freeze setting in,
our lips flapped about like Novocain.
Remember how I lost my teeth,
the wisdom ones, all four at once,
then coming to from general anesthetic
even though I’d signed the waiver indicating
I realized I might never wake up, and if so,
I wouldn’t hold anyone responsible,
meaning that if I’d died during our procedure,
I would end up one of those un-suing
figures in the past, tense, encased in ice, alone,
to be exhumed by some future scientific expedition
searching for remains of singular people like me,
from the last ice age, and they would see my shadow
outlined vaguely below, use Thermite bombs
to free me from my frozen tomb, a creature
who’d died nearly completely in the last ice age,
but still had life enough, once freed up,
to come back home to the tropics and thaw out.
Lanning Lee 