The Fear of Monkeys - The Best E-Zine on the Web for Politically Conscious WritingThe Lar Gibbon - Issue Thirty-Seven
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The Lar Gibbon  from Christiano Artuso The Lar Gibbon is found in Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand, although their range historically extended from southwest China to Thailand and Burma south to the whole Malay Peninsula and Sumatra. They are usually found in dipterocarp forest, including primary lowland and submontane rainforest, mixed deciduous bamboo forest, and seasonal evergreen forest. They are mostly frugivorous with fruit constituting fifty percent of their diet, but leaves, insects and flowers form the remainder. Their fur varies from black and dark-brown to light-brown, sandy colors. The hands and feet are white-colored, likewise a ring of white hair surrounds the black face. They are usually active for an average of eight hours per day, leaving their sleeping sites right around sunrise and entering sleeping trees an average of three hours before sunset. They spend their days feeding, resting, traveling, in social activities, vocalizing, and in intergroup encounters. True brachiators, they propel themselves through the forest by swinging under the branches using their arms. With their hooked hands, they can move swiftly with great momentum, swinging from the branches. Although they rarely come to the ground naturally, while there, they walk bipedally with arms raised above their heads for balance. Their social organization is dominated by monogamous family pairs, with one breeding male and one female along with their offspring. Family groups inhabit a firm territory, and each morning, the family gathers on the edge of its territory and begins a "great call", a duet between the breeding pair. Each species has a typified call and each breeding pair has unique variations on that theme. Recent studies indicate that gibbon song have evolved to communicate conflict in terms of predation. In the presence of Asiatic tiger, clouded leopard, crested serpent eagle and reticulated python songs were more likely to contain sharp wow elements than normal duets. Sexually, they are similar to other gibbons. Mating occurs in every month of the year, but most conceptions occur during the dry season in March, with a peak in births during the late rainy season, in October. On average, females reproduce for the first time at about eleven years of age. Gestation is six months long on average, and pregnancies are usually of a single young. Young are nursed for approximately two years, and full maturity comes at about eight years. On average they live to be twenty-five years old. They are threatened in various ways: they are sometimes hunted for their meat, sometimes a parent is killed to capture young animals for pets, but perhaps the most pervasive is the loss of habitat. Their habitats are threatened by forest clearance for the construction of roads, agriculture, ecotourism, domesticated cattle and elephants, forest fires, subsistence logging, illegal logging, new village settlement, and palm oil plantations.

   


A Poem by a Body Washed up on the Shore

by

John Grey

It's a night when cops gather,
sirens whirr,
and my conversation is cut short
by the water draining from my mouth,
and many onlookers are talking
because the sounds they make
is how they get by in life,
and yet, nothing they say
captures the attention
like my silence.

I've made out of whoever I was
an emptiness,
a body on a river bank.
I draw a crowd.
But I do not trust their sorrow.
Only their curiosity makes sense to me.
With me laid out like this,
with a sheet about to swallow what's left,
they get to feel superior.
He's dead. We're alive
It's their perfect ego boost.

I'm off on a stretcher now,
loaded into the back of a van.
To be honest, I don't get to see
the moments just after.
I can only imagine them
in the moments just before.
But people need to get in touch with their ghoulish side.
And I try to please them as much as I can.


John Grey is an Australian poet, and US resident. Recently published in Examined Life Journal, Evening Street Review and Columbia Review with work upcoming in Harpur Palate, Poetry East and Visions International.
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