Narrated by Ashley B. Davis
I touch things to soak up their years.
This hunger has become insatiable though;
my local history is not enough anymore.
Everything is too green,
only a couple thousand years old.
I need to go to Europe
and touch the buildings there.
Better yet, Greece. Egypt.
But everything’s been tainted
by the procreating of so many generations.
I crave the pure years of a site,
of a building, an object, a stone.
The first wheel,
the Neolithic age still adhering
in clumps of animal shit
or the first mortar and pestle,
dating eons before that.
I thirst for time undiluted, time
that still sits uncivilized,
touched only by its creator,
not yet transmogrified
by modern spectacle.
I want an uncharted cave.
I need to touch the painted walls,
whispers from the artists’ lips,
suspended, preserved in that space,
not yet ravaged by intrusion
or raped by indolent eyes.
I need to put my tongue
to the evaporated
water from their lungs.
Maybe there are enough years
in those stones, in that earth,
to fill me up.
BIO: Ashley B. Davis writes novels, short stories, and poems that tend toward the dark and gritty. Her work appears in Jamais Vu, Hello Horror, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. Her day jobs include managing rental property and taming two feral three-year-olds. Read more about her work at www.ashleybdavis.wordpress.com.