 The
Manyara Monkey - Issue
Thirty-Nine |
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To Know
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Epistemologies of Ignorance by Howie Good The fear of kissing, touching, being in a crowd is more
common than you might think. I'm lucky, though. I have windows. When the
weather improves, I'll be able to watch the Oriental poppies glow like
embers. My immediate ancestors, members of a despised race, floated out
of giant smokestacks, the sky ever willing to receive them. Alive, they
were stripped of their rights -- signs stated NO JEWS AND ANIMALS ALLOWED
-- and dead, they were stripped of the gold in their teeth. I don't know
how I know, but I know that a group of sharks is called a "shiver."
& The moment the central beam breaks, the whole of the structure will collapse, and I'll be able to get away amid the panic and confusion, maybe to Prague where I'll revive the paranoid style of Franz Kafka's short curious life, maybe to a dive bar in Key West where famous literary drunks used to drink, and though it takes months, I'll wait there for the monkeys crossing the Atlantic on rafts of vegetation, and while I wait, no longer be coerced by popular trends in food and fitness or defined by what a computer algorithm thinks a man looks like. & A World War I zeppelin floats above. It's the kind of shit that wears me down. What year was it they took our memories and replaced them with canisters of decaying film? Lately, I've collected inspiration on my walks -- cocoons and nests and thorns -- and pinned them to the wall. A tabby cat like the one Picasso gave his mistress when her dog disappeared in 1945 is last on the list. They say a man is a wolf to his fellow man. Bob from next door waves hello regardless. It gives him something to do with his hands.
Howie Good is the author of What It Is and How
to Use It (2019) from Grey Book Press, among other poetry collections.
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The Manyara Monkey is new to science, which means that even
though their location has been identified, little is known about
their habits and how they might differ from the other gentle monkeys.
They have a geographic range extending over between 1,500 and 5,900
square kilometres around Lake Manyara--hence the name--in the central-northern
part of Tanzania. The ecosystems here, including groundwater, mid-altitude
and montane forests at elevations of 960 to 2,550 metres, are relatively
understudied. But based on other studies of the gentle monkeys,
it is likely that the Manyara monkey is an important disperser of
forest tree seeds and an important consumer of invertebrates. Gentle
monkeys, sometimes also called greater periphery monkeys, are large,
long-tailed, tree-dwelling monkeys found across Southern and East
Africa. They inhabit evergreen forests at various altitudes, and
they are known to have highly developed arboreal skills compared
to some other types of monkey. Despite the fact that 60% (around
3,500 kmē) of their probable geographic distribution lies within
six protected areas, they are endangered. They face the same human-driven
threats as other primates in Tanzania, including the degradation,
loss and fragmentation of their forest habitat; poaching; loss of
wildlife corridors; fires; invasion of exotic plants; and climate
change. They are also hunted for bushmeat.